The Point of Mercy
by AlexG
Summary: 4th in the series. All Quinn wants is to visit a doctor for a routine exam. Is that too much to ask? But a trip with the Doctor is never as simple as it seems like it should be; there's always a mystery. Where is everyone at this hospital? The staff? The patients? Is there anyone else there? And when disaster strikes, can Quinn save the day with some guidance from the Doctor?
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: I'd never have believed it if you told me a year ago, but I'm now writing the 4th story in a series! And this from a guy who never finished one to completion before now (except the odd one-shot). The series so far has garnered so much positive attention and I'm very pleased with the result. The entire arc is starting to come together in my head and I think I have a good idea where we're going to end up by the time we're done. If you want to read the whole thing, start with "Harmony", move on to "The Harvesting Darkness" and "Long Goodbyes", and finally read this one, "The Point of Mercy"**

**Several of you expressed... I'll call it 'surprise' at the end of the last story, because some things happened that should have been impossible according to the canon of the series. You wondered if there was going to be a continuation in this next story that's starting today. Well, yes and no. My goal at the outset of this project was to write a whole new series of Dr Who with my favorite character from Glee as the companion. And just like any series, there's an overall arc developing independent of the individual adventures, like "Bad Wolf" and "Torchwood" and Cracks in the Universe in years past. I'll probably do about 10 stories in total, including a Doctor Lite episode (Like Blink, Turn Left, Love and Monsters) and a Christmas Special. Despite this one starting on Christmas Day, this isn't it... I just knew I wouldn't get around to writing a lot during the shopping season, so I'm giving you this chapter as a Christmas gift, then another one this weekend. Weekly releases will continue from there. **

**Anyway, the cliffhanger will be resolved, but not right away. There are already a lot of clues and more are coming, so try to figure it out along the way! I'd be really interested to know if anyone has any theories so far.**

**Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I hope you all enjoy tonight's episode "The Snowmen"... I'm certainly looking forward to it!**

* * *

The Doctor closed his eyes and took a deep sniff of the plate that had been set before him. The sweet scent of strawberries and cream was almost too much to bear. "Oh, ho, ho, that's delicious," the Doctor said, biting into a crepe and smiling maniacally. "You have got to try one of these." He offered his plate to Quinn, who looked at it sadly.

"No thanks," she said. "Too rich. Morning sickness. You understand."

He frowned as he sprinkled a dusting of cinnamon over the top of his breakfast. She'd been like this for a couple of days now, moping around the TARDIS and, by extension, everywhere they'd gone. He'd tried everything he could think of to make her happy again, up to and including bringing her here, to Paris, for breakfast, in a small cafe overlooking the Eiffel tower's construction. Nothing seemed to be capable of shattering her melancholy, however. Not the flowers taller than either of them on the solar platform orbiting the first extra-galactic human colony, not the planet that had been forced into an elliptical shape under the pull of two opposite neutron stars, not even the trip to the cinema that only showed adorable kitten videos all day long. It was sickeningly joy-inducing, and she hadn't so much as cracked a smile.

She had reason enough to be upset, he thought as he watched her rest her chin on her palms and sigh. It still hurt to see her stuck in her old patterns, unable to realize that she didn't need anyone else. Not that it wasn't nice to have people around once in awhile, but she had yet to realize that she could find happiness and purpose on her own instead of getting it from other people. It was like she didn't know for sure who she was if she wasn't the head cheerleader, the devoted daughter, or even just... kind of a bitch. Young humans tried on personalities like anyone else tried on pants, true, but none of the personas she'd adopted were anywhere near as vibrant as the real her. The Doctor liked the person she was when she wasn't posturing for anyone else. He wondered if she did as well.

Still, she'd suffered a lot of tragedies lately, not the least of which was losing someone she'd grown attached to recently. The Doctor thought the whole thing had moved a bit too fast, and if truth were to be told he wasn't sure he and Daniel would have hit it off famously anyway. Whether they were too dissimilar or too alike he couldn't say with certainly. It was a load off his mind, actually, but he'd never tell her that. He wanted to see her back to her cheerful self again, more than anything else, and so he'd taken her to all these places, avoiding trouble as much as possible, just to cheer her up. It wasn't working.

The Doctor wasn't just doing all that for her benefit either. He wasn't any better off when they left the Fragaria colony than she was. He was just better at suppressing it. If he stopped, even for a moment, memories of Gallifrey flooded back to him, the latest victims in an endless war with the Daleks. He hated them, more than he'd ever hated anyone or anything. More than he hated himself, he despised the Daleks, and not because of the genocide or the vengeful murders. No, tyrrany was something he could stand proudly against. But the Daleks handn't murdered the Time Lords, or wiped their planet from existence. That would have been bearable. But rather, the Daleks had turned a race of stodgy, old, non-interfering senators into a race that would willingly destroy time itself and every living thing just to live a bit longer.

Locking them away was to save the universe, he told himself over and over again. But it didn't change the fact that his home was gone, forever out of reach. It wasn't the Time Lock that had done it, though; the Gallifrey he knew died a long time back. Looking back was just too hard; looking forward, well... at least whatever pain may come was unknowable, and therefore impossible to dwell upon.

Quinn poked disinterestedly at a scrambled egg, while he took a long sip of his coffee - which was superb, by the way - and sighed. He looked out across the water at the tower, halfway through its construction. By 1889 it would stand majestically over the city, but now, a year earlier, it lacked the iconic sweep of the second tier that it would soon acquire. He turned back to his companion and gave her a long, appraising look.

She looked confused and a little put off by his scrutiny, then seemed to consider it an opportunity. "I need a doctor," she said.

He smiled a goofy grin. "At your service, ma'am," he said.

She rolled her eyes, then shook her head. "Not you," she said. "Not a planet-saving, injustice-fighting doctor. A _doctor_doctor." She looked at the watch she was wearing, still running on Lima, Ohio time. "I've been with you for three weeks now. I'm overdue for a prenatal appointment."

"Oh," he said, some of his excitement deflating at the thought of this ordinary, pedestrian task. "I suppose I could try to find you a place. 'Where' is the question."

"You mean to tell me you know the top 1000 burger joints in the universe, but not one single OB/GYN?"

"It's never really come up before," he replied, rubbing the back of his neck. "Which is actually... well, shocking, really."

She rolled her eyes and shook her head. "Well, whatever. The point is, it needs to be done. So get a phone book or Google it or do whatever you need to do. Just find one. You promised to help me." She put her fork down on the table forcefully, and crossed her arms over her chest. His first inclination was a flare of frustration, possibly anger, but he squelched it. Anyone could have a bad day, and she'd recently had a very bad one. Of course he didn't exactly appreciate being spoken to in that way, but he could forgive her the odd outburst. He'd had his fair share of those himself over the centuries.

"Are you alright?" he asked her, sensing something else was going on.

"I'm fine," she snapped. "Just... let's go."

He sighed. "Okay," he said quietly. He dug a few coins out of his pocket and left them on the table, picked his coat up from where it lay draped across the back of the adjacent chair, and shrugged it on. Quinn was already gone, arms still crossed and head tucked against a chilled wind that blew across the water. He sighed and followed her back to the TARDIS, closing the door behind them.

"I'll be in the back," she said. "Let me know when we get there."

"I will," he said, but she was already through the door. It took considerable restraint not to run back there, grab her by the shoulders and demand she snap out of it, but he knew that wouldn't be helping. Not that long ago it had been himself, albeit in a leather jacket and with short-cropped hair, who would be wandering the TARDIS looking for some space, while Rose stepped back and gave it to him. He could offer her the same thing without sulking about it. She wanted a doctor, and so he would find her one. So be it. Whether that was really what she was looking for or not was immaterial, and he had to admit it was probably a good idea anyway.

He'd never traveled with a companion in her condition before… not in the long term, anyway. He promised himself he'd look out for her, make sure he didn't take her anywhere too dangerous. But then again, that was always the plan, wasn't it? He never set out to get anyone hurt or killed but… it sure did seem to turn out that way from time to time. What was he even doing with her? If he were smart, if he were acting sensibly and rationally, he would drop her off at the nearest planet and never look back. To be responsible for one person was enough of a worry, but to be responsible for her and her child…

Then again, if he were acting sensibly and rationally, she wouldn't be here to begin with. If he were acting sensibly and rationally he would have left McKinley high school without a glee club, minus six bright, young, talented kids who had vanished without a trace. Quinn would have gone on without them, mourned their loss, maybe have stayed with that Puckerman kid. Would it have hurt? Sure. But she'd also be at home, safe and sound on her own planet, not running around out here with him.

He shook his head to clear it, telling the TARDIS to find a medical facility somewhere. The central column rose and fell as the Police Box forced its way into the time vortex in search of a doctor. He had to stop thinking this way. The last thing she needed - the last thing she would want - was someone else fussing over her like she was going to fall apart. As she would be the first to point out, she could take care of herself. Both Finn and Puck had played the part of the overprotective defender and she'd been annoyed at both of them for it. The last thing he wanted was to provoke her ire.

The TARDIS found a facility that seemed suitable, in New York in the year 2135, so he set a course and went to the back to find her and let her know they'd be there shortly. She wasn't in the kitchen or the library, and as she'd made plainly clear to him there were only a few things left in the wardrobe that would fit her, so it wasn't likely she was there either. That left the living quarters, and he went there to find her.

In just a moment he was outside her room - Rose's room. He should have insisted she have a new one and left this one untouched, as has always been his intention. But she'd thanked him so profusely after that first night, when he let her sleep here, about how perfectly firm the mattress had been and how soothing the silk sheets were, and how she'd been truly comfortable for the first time in months, and he couldn't bear to make her switch to another. But those had been Rose's sheets, a gift he bought for her on some alien bazaar when she complained that the originals had been scratchy. He told her that the high craftsmen on Gallifrey had woven them by hand with only silkworms for company and assistance. She said the high craftsmen could learn a thing or two about thread counts. He smiled at the memory. It seemed like a betrayal to let someone else use them - or the room in general - but he didn't say so.

That first night, back at McKinley, seemed so long ago now, even though it had only been a few weeks. Quinn could probably tell him exactly how long it had been, though. Usually the days all ran together, as they skipped from morning to night and back again, melting into weeks and months and years. Pretty soon it was impossible to say with any certainty how long he'd been traveling with someone.

But not Quinn. Quinn measured time meticulously. Just before she started traveling with him she'd taken to wearing a wristwatch, even though it had never been part of her attire before, and she was insistent that it not be tampered with. The hours and days ticked by in perfect sync with Lima, Ohio, a whole time stream away. Whenever he asked her she cited some logical, rational reason - keeping up with her vitamins, making sure she didn't miss morning prayers, keeping track of prenatal visits and her due date, etcetera - but he suspected a more sentimental reason. Once, he'd noticed her take a glance at the device and smile wistfully, even though they had been in the middle of directing a legion of soldiers to drop EMP grenades on an army of Cybermen from a helicopter at the time. It was just a fraction of a second, a few fleeting moments, but something had made her happy.

He shook his head, forcing himself back to the present. He was leaning against the wall, one sneaker up on the surface, staring at the doorknob and unsure about knocking to let her know he was here. It seemed like she didn't want to see him (or anyone) just at the moment, and he considered leaving, waiting until she ventured out to find him. But running away wasn't the Doctor's style. It wasn't the way to deal with Daleks, and it wasn't the way to deal with a hormonal young woman in the throes of a few mood swings, either. He'd only ever run from one place, and it was long gone now.

He stepped forward and knocked on the door softly. There was only silence from the other side, so he knocked again, slightly more loudly this time. "Come in," she whispered from inside the room.

He pushed the door open and stepped gingerly inside. "I found us a hospital," he said, leaning just inside the doorframe. "Just about, ooh, a hundred years after you left. There's a free clinic so I thought that'd work." She was sitting on the bed with her back to him, but she nodded slowly. "New York in the 22nd century is pretty marvelous," he said. "Oh, you ought to see it after sunset. Times Square has really changed since-"

"Can we just go?" She asked, cutting him off.

"Yeah. 'Course we can." She wiped her eyes with a tissue she'd been holding. "Quinn, have you been crying?"

"I'm fine," she said, sniffling as she stood up and grabbed a sweater from the back of the chair by the vanity. "Let's go."

For the second time today he followed her as she marched determinedly towards the TARDIS' doors, this time heading out instead of in. He picked up his own coat from the coral formation just inside the door and put it on.

DAVID TENNANT  
DIANNA AGRON

DOCTOR WHO

THE POINT OF MERCY


	2. Chapter 2

They stepped out onto a cold metal floor.

"What?" The Doctor said as soon as they were outside. He spun back around to face the TARDIS. "Where are we? Where've you taken us this time?!" he asked sternly, as if he expected it to respond.

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "Let me guess. No hospital and no clinic?"

"No, just the opposite," he said, pointing to the emblem on the door nearest them - a green crescent moon in a circle. "It's a hospital, alright, just not the one I was expecting."

She looked around the room at the same time he did. "We're in the lobby," she said.

"How can you tell?" He asked, too preoccupied staring down the TARDIS to have examined the room.

"The gift shop filled with get well soon cards and flowers was a giveaway," she said, sauntering into the shop and taking a sniff of a rose.

"Teleport pods," the Doctor observed from the next room over. "So you can come and go without swapping atmospheres. Not a bad idea with this many germs floating about." He punched a few buttons but nothing happened. "System's down. Looks like we'll have to take the lifts."

"What do you mean, 'swap atmospheres'?" She asked.

"Well, you don't want everybody and their brother docking at the airlock. Not with all the contagions they're swapping back and forth." She looked even more confused, and realization dawned on him. "Oh. You don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

He smiled impishly and held out his hand, which she tentatively took. Immediately he was dragging her along down a corridor behind the registration desk. "You're gonna love it," he said. They followed the corridor through a series of twists and turns, and when they finally found a long, straight section, he changed his position, getting behind her and covering her eyes with his hands.

"What are you doing?" she asked - neither angrily nor sarcastically for the first time today, he noticed - but she didn't pull away.

"Just come on," he said, guiding her slowly down the hall. "We've been traveling for a bit, now," he said, "and I promised you all of time and space, but we've only been to a few planets."

"Doctor, it _has _been good, I-"

She'd tried to turn around to face him, but he stopped her. "Uh-uh, let me finish," he said, keeping her turned away from him and still covering her eyes. "Now, planets are one thing but once you've seen one, you've seen them all to some degree. Oh sure they're all unique in their own way, but I mean... a bit of ground, a bit of sky, that's it. So, Quinn Fabray, I give you... the universe," he said, taking his hands away at the last word.

She blinked a few times, unsure what she was looking at. When it hit her a moment later, her mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide. "We're in space," she said.

"Yep," he replied from behind her. "A medical space station, completely self-contained and self-sufficient."

She took a few steps closer to the window. "We're actually in space!" Through the window she could see a vast starscape, with a smattering of blue particles shining in the light of the nearby sun. A brown planet turned beneath them. "What's all that out there?"

"It's a nebula of some kind," he said, stepping forward with her. "Most nebulas tend towards the reddish but if the nearby sun doesn't give off that much UV light, the electrons in the hydrogen gas don't get excited up to another energy level and fall back down again. So, no red." He spoke quietly, like one might when trying not to wake a small child. "Now, the blue... the blue's just the sunlight reflecting off the dust. Look at that. Millions and millions of tiny particles, all swirling and swarming around out there. Maybe a faint planetary ring of some kind."

"The stars are so much brighter than I thought," she said. "I've seen them from outside the city at night but never like this. It's kind of a miracle,"

"Yeah," he said. They looked out the window in silence for a few moments longer, then the Doctor snapped out of the reverie. "C'mon," he said. "You've got a miracle of a different kind to look after." He took off at a brisk pace back towards the lobby. Quinn took one last look out the window, then took off following him.

There was still nobody in the lobby when they returned, just the Police Box standing in a corner. "Where is everyone?"

"I don't know. Am I everyone's keeper?"

"Very funny," she said sarcastically. She looked over the reception desk and noticed a bell like she might have expected in a hotel in the fifties.

"That won't help you," he said. "There's nobody around on the whole deck."

She pressed the button on top of the bell nonetheless, and when she did a light shone down on the other side of the desk, which quickly resolved into a human form.

"Welcome to Mercy Station," the hologram said. "Please state the name of the patient you wish to visit, or, if you are a new patient, please fill in the forms below." A series of forms lit up on the touchscreen surface of the desk, all waiting to be filled out.

"Aha. Holographic automation. That's why there's nobody about," the Doctor said. "They're probably just trying to save a bit of cash. Even in the future medicine's a rough business. Though I'd have preferred 'please state the nature of the medical emergency'."

"What?"

"Nothing, as you were. Carry on."

She turned back to the forms before her. "I don't understand half of what these are asking for," she said. "Galactic Origin Code? Interspecial blood type? I don't have any of these."

"Hm... good point," he said. "Um, hello," he said, addressing the hologram now. "My friend here needs an exam but... I'm afraid I can't give you any of her information. She's... under my protection, via Convention One of the Shadow Proclamation."

"Convention One," the hologram replied in a flat monotone. "Accessing." She stood unnaturally still for a few moments, then said, "Convention one, concerning individuals under the official witness protection program. According to protocol the escorting officer must submit identification at the time of examination."

"Oh, yes, that's fine. I'm the Doctor, hello."

The hologram turned her attention on the man in the pinstripe suit completely now, looking him up and down. "What's it doing?" Quinn asked.

"Just a quick scan, no worry."

The head snapped up and looked at him again. "All medical personnel must report to Chief of Medicine Stuart Malone on the command deck."

"Oh, no, no, no," he said. "I'm not _a_ Doctor. I'm _the _Doctor..."

"All medical personnel must report to Chief of Medicine Stuart Malone on the command deck," she repeated. Then she looked at Quinn. "Proceed to examination on level three. Teleport pods are currently offline. Please proceed via turbolift." And the hologram disappeared.

"Great, so now I'm a fugitive, too."

"Only as long as we're here. Here, you'll need this," he said, passing her the psychic paper. "Just give that to the nurses and doctors. That's your official identification from the Shadow Proclamation. You'll be listed in any paperwork as Jane Doe, and I get the only copy of your file when we leave. So all round, not a bad way for things to work out."

She took the leather wallet and started towards the turbolift, but turned back to face him a few steps later. "Did you... that is, do you... want to come down with me?"

"Ah!" he said, as if the question itself had stung him like a bee. "Erm... I..." he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

She cocked her head to the side. "You're _squeamish_, aren't you?"

"No! No, no, no, I'm not really squeamish of anything! Not... swabs or... fluids or... jars with bits of things floating in them," he said, his face contorting into a grimace.

"I don't believe it! You _are_!" she said. "I once saw you pick up a little squid-thing dripping green slime and _lick it_, and you're afraid to come to this appointment with me?"

"How else was I going to figure out if it was salinated or not?" he asked defensively. "And anyway, being squeamish hasn't got a thing to do with it. You heard the lady. The Chief of Medicine is waiting for me upstairs."

"Whatever," she said. "I'm going to go get this taken care of. I'll meet you back here."

"Have a lovely time," he said, stepping into one turbolift while she got into another. "See you in a bit."

"Later, coward," she teased. But as the door closed and the lift descended, her smile faded away. It'd been so easy to fall back into step with the Doctor, laughing and joking with each other, but she'd promised herself she wouldn't do that. She wouldn't let herself get caught that way again. She and the Doctor were... associates. Traveling companions. Nothing more. Just a driver and a passenger along for the ride, that was all they were. That was all she'd let them be.

The elevator ride was quick enough, and soon the doors opened to reveal a corridor leading to a set of smaller rooms. "Hello?" She called, but nobody was there to answer her. "Hello?" There were chairs surrounding a coffee table and a desk, pretty standard waiting room fare. But behind the desk, the chair was overturned, like someone had got up in a hurry and knocked it over. Maybe someone was having a heart attack somewhere or something? It seemed like the kind of thing that happened hospitals - people running around and yelling 'stat!' and stuff. She sat down and picked up one of the magazines, sure someone would be with her shortly.

She sat reading for a while, not really focusing on the text before her. Her mind wandered as her eyes scanned the pages, thinking back over the past several days with the Doctor. She felt bad about the way she'd snapped at him earlier, but she told herself it was a necessary evil... necessary for her own sanity and for his own safety. He was trying so hard to make her happy again after Daniel... after her friend had gone way, vanished into the ether. She knew that; it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. He wouldn't be completely happy until she was happy too, cheered up and back to her old self. But that wasn't her fault, and she couldn't take responsibility for his happiness that way. She refused to force herself into an emotional state that didn't match what she was feeling inside, certainly, but that was only part of the issue.

She snapped the magazine shut and flung it back onto the coffee table. She didn't want to think about this anymore. And where was that damned doctor, anyway? She couldn't wait around all day for this. The Doctor - her Doctor - didn't seem to want to stay here all that long. She'd forced him to come there with her anyway, against his will. How long until he simply grew bored and left without her?

She was about to stand up and start knocking on the doors that led to the individual examination rooms, when there was a subtle vibration through the floor. It was barely noticeable. If she'd been standing instead of sitting in one of the chairs, she might never have realized it was there, and it stopped as quickly as it had started. She stood up, intrigued and mildly concerned, as another shudder made the room around her vibrate. It was like being in the backseat of a car being driven over grooved pavement, a subtle reverberation of every surface around her. By the entrance to the examination wing there was a glass window out into the corridor with the turbolift, etched with the Mercy Station logo and the same crescent moon symbol, and if she stared at it very intently she could see the whole thing distort its shape slightly, the edges of the etchings appearing to become fuzzy as the place shook.

Just as abruptly as the whole thing had started, it stopped. Something about the situation just felt wrong, but she forced herself to stay calm. It certainly hadn't raised any alarm from anyone else down here... no doctors or nurses were running around as if this were an emergency. Maybe it was the engine, or a thruster on the station readjusting the orbit, the ventilation system... it could be anything. There was no point getting herself all panicked when there was a very real possibility that nothing was wrong.

So why _was _she feeling panicked? She sat back down in the chair, retrieved the magazine, and tried to force herself to focus on the words on the page this time. The effort succeeded for almost a minute, at which point a heavy steel door at the entrance to the room slammed shut, a shutter closed over the window to the hallway, and there was a terrible crashing sound and the entire station shuddered under the force of some huge impact. There was nothing gentle about the motion this time. The entire room lurched under the impact, tilting the floor at a sharp angle. Quinn let out a yelp as the cluster of chairs and the coffee table slid a good two feet towards the wall of the waiting room, and the lights flickered and died. She sat there for a moment, taking inventory, catching her breath, and trying to settle her nerves, when the lights came back on... or at least a strip of lights near the ceiling did. It was enough to see by, just barely, and she extricated herself from the sea of chairs all pressed against one another, looking around the darkened room and trying to decide what to do.

She whipped her head around and nearly jumped out of her skin when the phone on the nurse's desk started to ring.


	3. Chapter 3

It should _not _be this empty around here, the Doctor thought as the door to the command center opened. Alright, an automated receptionist - basically a glorified answering machine - was understandable. But to do as much wandering around as they had done and still not run into a single person, well, that made things a lot more difficult to justify. He stepped out into the command deck and took a look around, taking in all the sights.

The command deck was huge, with a plethora of workstations and screens on the level he was standing on, and a catwalk above where the command staff could oversee any of the teams below. Readouts scrolled across the screens, not just with information about power levels, onboard computers, communications, and docking systems, but also with patient information from all of the different levels.

"Hello? Hellooooooooooooo..." the Doctor called, turning to survey every aspect of the room with his hands in his pockets. "Nobody here. Hm. Well, nothing like having a look-see about the place," he said. "Ooh, talking to yourself, Doctor? Only they say that's the first sign of madness... but then again why mess with success, eh?"

Towards the front of the command section, near thruster control, was an engineering panel, and he made his way over there first. Here, at the front of the room, he was staring out the giant curved window that made up the entire forward bulkhead. He paused to admire the translucent particles again as they caught the light from the system's sun, surrounding the station as far as the eye could see. The planet they orbited turned slowly beneath them, standing out in stark contrast to the shimmering blue around them, like a dark stain on an otherwise stunningly blue sheet of suede.

He turned his attention back to the panel. "Now, let's see what we're dealing with here," he said, pulling up a schematic. The station was divided into three sections. At the top was the command deck, with the control center where he was currently standing, plus offices for consultations and meetings on the two decks below. Under that was the bulk of the medical facility itself, with levels for intensive care, surgery, and quarantine. The labs and large scale diagnostic equipment filled the two levels below that, one level was divided into three surgical bays, and finally the clinic and exam rooms were at the bottom of that section. The bottom two levels were reserved for engineering and station-wide maintenance equipment, the same kinds any other station - medically minded or otherwise - would have.

The ER was nowhere to be found, the Doctor noticed. If a ship came up to the station in need of medical assistance, the patient would be teleported aboard and sent directly to the proper section. It was a pretty ingenious solution; waiting in the teleport buffer effectively stopped the patient bleeding or succumbing further to infection. It also meant no matter how long the line was, nobody died waiting for treatment. This would revolutionize the concept of medical triage, no doubt. It was a clever engineering feat. So why had he never seen anything like it before?

He poured over the schematics, admiring the design and circuitry on a deck by deck level. This wasn't some kit space station, not the kind of prefab job that was roughly equivalent to a flat-panel some-assembly-required furniture box. No inserting tab A into slot 5,604. This was a custom creation, painstakingly built from the ground up. It was immaculate, and a testament to the engineers who built it, with safety systems and redundancy controls up the wazoo. So what had happened here? Where was everybody? A crew didn't just disappear after all. They must be someplace.

He searched the room again, this time looking up towards the ceiling. A security camera was attached to the ceiling in the corner, and he approached it, tapping the lens with his finger a few times. "Hello? Anyone at home?" He peered into the camera for a few seconds before shrugging and abandoning the gesture. At least there were no eyeballs in the camera. He'd never wanted to see that sort of thing again as long as he lived.

Cameras. _Cameras_! Oh, but that would mean they had a security log! He could find out exactly what had happened here. He made his way over to the security station to call up the logs, and he was just about to play the last entry when the floor plating shook. Not much, just ever so slightly, but enough that he noticed immediately. His head shot up, looking for information from the panels surrounding the command area. There were minor power fluctuations all across the station, and the lights were flickering ever so slightly. It was just a tremor... just a tiny little bump, but enough to be an omen of danger nonetheless.

He put his glasses on as he scanned the room, looking at all the screens in question. Together they all told the same story. The station was vibrating in some way, for some reason, but there was no indication of why. He looked at each station in succession, trying to find the source of the shuddering. None of the panels gave any particularly useful information, and as he was flitting between them like an overexcited bumblebee, the shaking and shuddering stopped. He ended up back at the engineering console. "What was that?" He asked of nobody in particular. "Something's shaken this station like a blender. What is it?"

That was when he heard the tap. Not a loud one by any means... just a tiny little tap against the massive picture window at the front of the command deck, right in front of the panel he was staring at. He looked up just in time to see a rock. Not a large rock, not any bigger than a pebble. Just a tiny little thing that had bumped up against the glass and then bounded off again, spinning in the gravity-free space just outside. He leaned in close and peered at it. "How did you get in here?" He asked it. It didn't reply, unsurprisingly enough. But suddenly it was joined by a few of its friends of varying shapes and sizes. A slew of tiny rocks bounced against the glass, sounding remarkably like a rainstorm in the cold depths of space. "Why aren't the shields going up?" he asked, running to the security station.

The report from the console he found there wasn't even remotely helpful. Not only were the shields locked out, but the sensor package embedded into the hull wasn't even saying that there was anything at all out of the ordinary. Despite the fact that he was looking right at it, every system aboard the station insisted that there was absolutely nothing wrong outside. Upon approach of any foreign object that wasn't transmitting an IDS, the shields should have been raised to absorb any kinetic impact and vaporizing any unauthorized material. Even a tiny pebble traveling at a sufficient velocity would be enough to puncture the hull, something that was certainly possible in a frictionless, gravity-reduced environment. He focused on trying to get the sensors up and running.

A few seconds later he realized that had been his mistake, because when he happened to look back up at the transparent wall of the command center, he saw the asteroid.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: The goal of this story as a whole is to cement the relationship between the Doctor and Quinn, providing them the "getting to know you" phase that's been missing up to this point, I think. Both of them have doubt about each other as well as themselves, so the idea was that by the end of this adventure, she knows where she stands with him and vice versa. The upside of this is that there's a lot of good (at least I think it's good) character development. The bad side, depending on your point of view, is that there's a lot of dialogue in this story. Like, _a lot_ a lot. All of which is to say, if that's not your cup of tea... sorry. I hope everyone enjoys it anyway. Your feedback is welcome and appreciated... I'm not sure if I made the Doctor too shamefully manipulative in this chapter or not. Thanks for your continued support, everyone!**

* * *

It wasn't a small asteroid, either. It was fairly large, and it was moving towards the station at a pretty good clip. The sensors still refused to see it, still refused to raise the shields and, stubbornly, refused to obey his attempts at a manual override. "Oh, come on, come on, come _on_!" he shouted at the console, running the sonic over the interface and, occasionally, glancing up at the asteroid. It had rolled into his field of view from the top left corner of the window, and was tumbling ever-closer, heading for an impact with one of the lower decks. He tried every trick he could think of - and at risk of sounding immodest, he knew quite a few - but nothing did it. He couldn't convince the computer to raise the shields.

The best he could do was seal the internal bulkheads and raise the emergency forcefields inside to try to increase the structural integrity of the station. By now it was too late for the shields anyway; the asteroid was already within the bounds of where the protective envelope would form. He braced himself for the impact as the station lurched under his feet, the entire structure tilting at an unnatural angle before the relief thrusters kicked in to stabilize the orbit. They had only just started to correct for the changes in pitch and yaw when they abruptly cut out again, as the lights flickered down to emergency levels. The entire station became eerily silent as ventilation ceased except for the minimal level of oxygen recycling, and the steady background hum of the power core many decks below cut out. Every bit of ambient background sound vanished in a heartbeat, leaving only those systems which could run on the emergency power generators still functional.

Unfortunately, that wasn't much. Most of the panels were dead, with only those deemed most critical to the station's survival still running. Worse still, the fusion reactors at the very core of the station were offline; whether that was from direct damage they suffered in the impact or an automatic shutoff for safety, he couldn't ascertain. Worse still, the blast doors that had sealed the bridge in were locked closed. Unsealing them would be easy enough, but without power to the door mechanism he'd never be able to budge it on his own.

For all the safety and security aboard the station, though, nobody seemed to have thought through what would have been most necessary in a crisis, because the only comm line that was open was the one from here down to the maintenance decks all the way at the bottom of the station. No PA system, no line down to the medical staff to alert them to the situation, nothing. And it was that sort of engineering oversight that he just couldn't abide, he thought, as he pulled open a control panel, rerouted the interface leads, and gave the whole thing a good buzzing over with the sonic. He stood back up, turned on the comm unit attached to the commander's chair, and blew into the mic a few times, making sure everything was working.

* * *

Quinn approached the ringing phone with trepidation. She was frightened - much more so than she would ever have let on had there been anyone else around. The lighting in here was just creepy now, and that coupled with the thick shutters over the doors and windows and the way all the sounds in the station had apparently gone silent... it was disconcerting, to say the very least.

She let it ring a few more times but when it became apparent that whoever it was wasn't going to give up, she picked up the handset - cordless, she noted - and held it to her ear. "Hello?"

"Quinn! You alright?" asked a comfortingly familiar British accent on the other end.

"Doctor! I'm fine. Where are you? What happened?"

"I'm in the command center," he said. "The station's been struck by an asteroid. We're restricted to emergency power and auxiliary systems, but I'm trying to patch into the external comm array. Help's coming, just hang on."

"Doctor, there's nobody down here," she said. "I haven't seen anyone all day apart from you. Where are they?"

"I don't know. A while ago I was gonna check the logs but there's not enough power now. It's possible they saw the asteroid coming and evacuated to the planet. Either way I'll raise someone. We'll get help."

"Why don't we just get back to the TARDIS?"

"I closed all the reinforced doors on the station before the asteroid hit," he said. "That'll contain as much atmosphere as possible, stop fires, and reinforce hull integrity."

"Okay, great. And?"

"Most of the doors throughout the station have a manual override to open them without power, but not the bridge doors. It's a safety thing. If someone's trying to break in, then..."

"Yeah, okay, I get it," she said. "So you're trapped?"

"Until and unless we can get power up here, yes."

"Could you cut through?"

"Maybe, if I had the equipment, but I don't. There's a teleport pod, too, but the whole network's down station-wide."

"Okay, then if I can get to the TARDIS I can..."

"Don't you dare even think about it. Without a clear understanding of 5-D hyperdimentional flight plans..."

"Alright, okay, fine, I won't touch your precious ship. But you really should teach me to fly some day."

"Try some century. It's not like going down the DLVA and getting your driving license. Well, it is, but the hazard perception test is fifteen years long."

"Okay, what are we going to do?" she asked, sighing in annoyance at his rambling.

"Let's not make this harder than it needs to be," he said. "If I can get a message to the planet, they'll be able to help, but I'll need power to the transceiver array to do that."

"Okay. Power. How do we do that?"

"Well... I'm trapped in the command center," he said, "and there's nobody else about."

"Oh, no!" she said. "Not me. I don't know the first thing about rewiring... anything."

"I'll guide you, tell you what to do."

"No, I don't think I can..."

"Do you trust me, Quinn?"

She took a deep breath. "Of course I do."

"I trust you, too," he said. "You're brave, and clever, and I'm sure you can do this if you try. Trust me." She didn't say anything, and he feared he was losing the battle. "Please, Quinn? For all of us? For all _three _of us?"

She hesitated a moment longer, then nodded resolutely. "Alright, okay, alright," she said. "Just... tell me what you need me to do."

"Brilliant!" he said in a lively tone, but up in the command center he was frowning, not smiling. _There you go again, Doctor, manipulating people into doing what you want them to do, _he thought. "You're on deck three," he said. "I got a look at the schematics before the computers locked up. Now, the bottom two decks are engineering and maintenance, and that's where you'll find the fusion reactors."

"Reactors? You want me to go into a _nuclear reactor_?"

"It's perfectly safe," he said. "It's not like I'm suggesting you hotwire a _fusion _reactor, after all."

"Oh, well, when you put it that way my trepidation seems ludicrous," she said sarcastically.

"The reactors have probably stopped because of an automated shutdown protocol," he said. "They're probably just waiting for a human to verify that there are green lights across the board and everything will start up again automatically. It'll be a complete cinch."

"Not if I can't get out of this room it won't," she said.

"There should be a panel by the door," he said. "A little red one. Just slide it open and there should be a crank inside."

She found the door and opened it, just like he said. "Now what?"

"The doors are pneumatic," he said. "There's a pocket of pressurized atmosphere behind the door that forces it closed. Turn the crank and it'll release the pressure. Then you should be able to force the door open."

"Okay, here goes," she said. She reached out and tried to give the crank a twist. "It's stuck," she grunted, trying to force it to move. "Don't they have WD-40 in the future?"

"It's just from disuse," he said. "Try both hands."

She set the comm unit down and shoved with all her might. Sure enough, once she budged it the initial few centimeters, it turned easily, and with a slight hiss the door cracked open. She stuck her fingers into the gap and pushed one side of the door out of the way. "One down, how many to go?"

"A lot," he replied. "You're on the perimeter of the deck now. The whole station's like an inverted pushpin in space," he said. "Administration, offices, and command are all up in the long narrow spire. The bulk of the work happens in the larger section below. Are there any signs or anything? Something that says 'central core' or 'maintenance' or something?"

"I can't really make anything out," she said as she approached the turbolift again. "Hang on a minute." She went back into the waiting room and opened the door to the first exam room. "I need some kind of light out there. Maybe one of the doctors left a penlight or something."

"Is there an otoscope handy?"

"A what?"

"That... thing with the lensy bit they look down your ears with."

"Uh... yes! Got one!" She pressed the button on the side. "It's not very bright though."

"See if you can unclasp the head to expose the LED. If you can then it'll be a lot brighter. It's just encased in plastic."

It took a little doing to figure out how to get the top of the unit detached, but she managed it after a moment, leaving her with the equivalent of a battery powered candlestick. "Well, this is as good as it's gonna get," she said.

"Once you're out in the dark it'll seem brighter."

She made her way back towards the turbolift again. As promised, once she was away from the emergency lighting it was easier to see the effect of her light. It certainly wasn't bright by any means, but it was enough to be able to read the signs. "There's nothing about maintenance access on any of the signs out here," she told him.

"Maybe you'd have to get off the beaten path to find it," he said. "Maybe there's a security office or a janitor's closet, or..."

While he rambled off a list of possibilities, she opened the red hatch next to the turbolift door and turned the crank to release the mechanism. Once she could slip the door open, she looked inside. "There's a ladder in the elevator shaft," she said, leaning in and looking up and down with the light.

"Ah," was the curt reply.

"What? You wanted me to find a way down. This is it."

"Yeah, but I was hoping for stairs or something a little less... exposed. It's just... are you sure that's a good idea?"

"I may not be as agile as I was a few months ago but I think I can handle a ladder," she replied.

"Okay, just... be careful. Don't lose your footing."

"I'll certainly try." The hardest part was inching herself around the ledge and getting ahold of the ladder at all. Once she'd done that, climbing down wasn't all that difficult. She'd hefted Maryann Sanders to the top of the pyramid enough times to be able to make it down a ladder.

"It's just two decks down," the Doctor said on the comm unit. "Let me know as soon as you get there."


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: More character development. I felt bad about just piling on another tragedy in Quinn's past but... I got over it, obviously.**

**While I normally don't respond to reviews directly in the stories, I have to give a shoutout to brandon barclay who's been with the story since the beginning. You ask a lot of good questions but I can't answer any of them because you haven't registered an account at the site, which means I can't PM you. I feel bad because I've been ignoring all your queries for so long, but I really like to keep conversation threads out of the author's notes. Thanks for reading though... whenever I get writer's block I look back at all the reviews, and yours especially remind me that people want to know what happens next.**

* * *

"Okay, I made it," she said, forcing open the turboshaft doors and stepping out onto the maintenance deck. "Now what?"

"The fusion core will be at the very center of the station," he said. "Just make your way in carefully and slowly, and I'll tell you what to do from there."

Fortunately, the maintenance decks abandoned the public-facing pretense of gleaming metal and stark white walls, and the layout was much more open down here. There was no maze of corridors to follow and get lost in like there was up above. Instead, a sign on the wall indicated a key of colors and symbols for each destination corresponding to a painted path on the floor.

"Reactor control... reactor control..." She scanned down the long list until she found it. "Looks like I'm following the green diamond road."

"Just take it slow and be careful," the Doctor said. "Who knows what kind of damage there could be down there?"

"Thanks for the reassuring words," she said sarcastically.

It was going to be something of a long walk, she realized. The cavern, for lack of a better word, was huge - easily the size of four football fields laid out as quadrants, probably larger, and she had to wind her way through equipment and machinery on the floor. Some of the equipment she couldn't even come close to identifying, but it was huge, standing much taller than she did. The whole thing hearkened back to a tour of Hoover Dam when she was a little girl. She and her family had stood on a platform watching the turbines on the floor below spinning, generating power.

"Are you any closer to finding out where everyone is?" she asked.

"Once I get the comms up I can ask," he said. "Other than that, the video logs are down, too."

She made a guttural sound of aggravation. "How much power can that take? Did they just turn _everything _off?" she asked.

"Under this kind of system, every piece of equipment falls into priority levels. Anything that isn't rated priority 1, absolutely necessary for survival, doesn't get any power."

"Couldn't you just reprogram the rating with the sonic?"

He shook his head, then realized it wasn't doing any good since she couldn't see him. "No, The designations are controlled by a computer down on your level."

"At least that means something's still running."

"Yeah..." he said, trailing off. "Hmmmmm..."

"What 'hm'?" she asked.

"Nothing. Not important. Don't worry about it."

"No, whenever you make a sound like that it always means something is up, and I- ouch!"

"What is it?! What's wrong?!"

"Ow, ow, ow! It's okay, I just stubbed my toe. It's crazy dark down here," she said. "And this stupid ear light isn't helping much at all." She trudged along in silence for a few moments more, then said, "So come on. What's really going on?"

"You know as much as I do. An asteroid the size of-"

"No, not that," she said. "You noticed something. What was it?"

"It really doesn't matter," he said.

"I've got like a ten minute walk here," she said, "and I don't want to spend it in silence." He still didn't say anything, so she tried once more. She sighed and said, "If you must know... it's scary down here. It's pitch black and dead silent and... just talk to me. Please."

"Quinn Fabray," he said, and even the length of a whole highrise away she could hear the smirk on his face coming through in his voice. "The girl with the world trembling at her feet is afraid of the dark."

"Yeah, mocking me was not what I had in mind," she said.

"It's rare enough, though," he said. "You're not afraid of anything, hardly," he said. "Burning buildings, vindictive cheerleading coaches, staunch conservative parents, jocks and bullies and slushie facials... and nothing flaps the unflappable Quinn Fabray. So why the dark?"

"I really don't want to talk about this," she said.

"I wonder what it could be," he said. "What kind of thing does that? It'd have to be something big, something extraordinary, to lodge itself that deep in the psyche..."

"Fine!" she snapped. "I tell you why I'm scared of the dark, you tell me what's wrong with the station. Deal?"

"Done," he replied, grinning.

She took a deep breath, stepping over some kind of conduit tubing as she did so and then ducking down to avoid a series of wires hanging loose from a scaffold crossing the hallway. "When I was seven one of my cousins locked me in a root cellar."

The line went silent for a few moments, and then the Doctor said, "That's it?"

"We were visiting them on a farm in Oklahoma," she said. "My dad's brother owned it. He never grew a thing, just wanted the space away from other people and room for some chickens. The adults all went to do something and left us two together. Clancy was... a prankster. I was reading a book in their living room when he came downstairs, said he'd been listening to the radio, and told me there was a tornado coming, and I believed him. I was just a kid, and he was twelve years old, he was grown up as far as I was concerned, so I believed him. He took me outside and he put me in the cellar and locked the door, and I was down there for hours. It was damp and it smelled and there were a couple of rats in the corner."

"So you were scared because you felt trapped."

"No," she said quietly. "He said he was going to go get some food and water and he'd come hide with me," she said. "But when he didn't come back I thought... I thought the storm got him. I spent the whole afternoon thinking that..." she took a deep breath to try to calm tears that were already nearing the surface. "...thinking that I'd never see anyone I loved again." She sat down on a nearby crate, letting the light and comm fall to the floor as she sniffled, not even bothering to try and stop the emotions now. "And I cried, Doctor. I sat in the dark with nothing else to do and I cried because I didn't think anyone would ever love me anymore." She let a few tears fall where they may. "I'm afraid of the dark because it reminds me of how I felt back then, only now it's true. No parents, no boyfriend, no home, and no planet. That's why." Neither of them said anything for a moment. "Satisfied?" she finally asked angrily.

The Doctor sighed. No, he wasn't satisfied at all. If he'd suspected even for a moment that this was anything more than a little irrational fear he'd never have pressed the issue. Now he felt like the universe's biggest jerk. He fumbled for a response, unable to think of anything suitable. "Now. What's wrong?" she asked him.

"I'm just... I think you-"

"Not about... that. The station. Come on, I held up my end of the bargain."

If she wanted to change the topic at this point, he was inclined to do just that. "It was something you said," he told her. "Something's still running, you said. I had to rewire the communications system up here to get a call down to your section, which doesn't make any sense at all. But as soon as you went out of range of that room, I should have lost you... only I didn't. Something's patched that office phone into the official communications network, and it wasn't me."

"Maybe it's all automatic," she said.

"Yeah... maybe," he replied, in exactly the right tone to indicate that he knew full well this wasn't the case.

"Alright," she said, standing up and resuming her walk. "I'm nearly there now."


	6. Chapter 6

The reactor control room wasn't anywhere near as complex as she'd been expecting. She would not have been surprised to find a room filled with blinking computer monitors, and walls lined floor to ceiling with gauges, buttons, indicator lights, and switches. Instead, she found herself in a small booth with a thick glass window looking into a larger round chamber. The room on the other side of the glass was huge, and inside were several pieces of strange equipment.

"Have you made it?" The Doctor asked her over the comm unit.

"I think so," she replied. "I've got a couple computer panels in front of me, and there's a window into another chamber."

"That sounds like it," he said. "Through the window, you've got a great big sphere, right?"

"Um... sort of," she said.

"What do you mean, 'sort of'?"

There was indeed a huge spherical object in the chamber, but it wasn't alone by any means. "The thing you're talking about is here, but it's not the only thing in there."

"What else?"

"Surrounding the big sphere in the center are these little... rectangle things. It's like a cube with a pyramid cut out of one of the corners, I guess. It's hard to describe. Does that make any sense?"

"Yeah, I'm following you."

"Only... one of them doesn't look quite right," she said. "There are five of them all pointed at the sphere, but one of them looks like it's been cracked in two.

"Oh, no," he said, voice dripping with concern.

"Is that, 'Oh no it's broken'', or 'Oh no your baby's going to have two heads'?"

"No, no, it's not dangerous. But if I'm right - and I usually am - those are subspace conduit generators."

"And that's a bad thing?"

"No. Not usually. A fusion reactor generates a field of plasma, then siphons off the heat to generate electricity, first through steam turbines and then later, in the 22nd century, through direct thermal induction circuitry. But you have to contain all that plasma to keep the reaction going, and magnetic fields were fine within a fixed location on a planet's magnetic field. But once you go extra-atmospheric it's a lot harder to make sure the magnetic field is constant, which is why they started creating a local subspace pocket to contain it instead. If something damaged one of the field generators in the collision, that would explain why the reactor shut down."

"So maybe we can fix the field generator?"

"No! Don't go in there under any circumstances! It was about 180 million degrees in there an hour ago, so unless you have some SPF 10K sunblock..."

"Bad idea. Got it."

"It's really quite clever, when you think about it," he said. "You lot, you realized the incredible natural power of a star, so you created your own. That's absolutely mad, and that makes it so, _so _brilliant!"

"Yeah, humanity's awesome. Go us," she deadpanned. "But what are we going to do right now?"

"Hm. I haven't quite got that bit worked out yet."

She sat silently for a moment, watching the screen blink with a variety of flat-lined graphs, waiting for him to work something out, when a burst of inspiration struck her. "Doctor? How does a fusion reactor work?"

"I've told you, heat from the plasma field gets-"

"No, I remember that," she said, interrupting. "But what makes the plasma field to begin with?"

"Hydrogen nuclei fuse under heat and pressure to make helium nuclei," he said, in a distracted tone that meant he was probably leaning over a monitor up there in the control room, glasses on, and trying to glean some meaning from what it said.

"So they need to generate heat to start with?"

"Yeah, usually through an electrical current or..." he trailed off. "Oh. OH!"

"What?"

"Quinn Fabray, you're brilliant!" he said.

She smiled in spite of herself. "Am I?" she asked as coyly as she could muster.

"They have to have a separate power source to kickstart the reaction," he said. "It'll be completely isolated from the rest of the systems on board. It won't be enough to power the whole station, not by a long shot, but I can shut everything down anywhere but where you are, and guide you up here to me. Then when we've contacted a rescue ship they show up, cut me out, and off we go, back to the TARDIS."

"And to another doctor? Preferably one whose office is on the surface of a planet? I don't even care which planet. I'm not picky."

"We'll be there before you know it," he said, some of the old excitement she was used to seeping back into his voice. And try as she might, she couldn't help but feel some of that excitement, too. It was contagious.

"Alright, what do I do?"

"The Ohmic Generator will be inside the sphere," he said. "Go to the control panel, open up the master control interface. If you activate the core maintenance subroutine then the outer shell should open up."

"And then?"

"And then, with a little bit of jiggery-pokery, we can override the safety protocols to turn the generator on even though the shell is open, tie the Ohmic Generator into the capacitors outside the chamber, and get power flowing through the system again."

The entire process took nearly an hour to complete, during which Quinn learned more about shell integration and override commands than she ever thought possible, but finally, on their ninth attempt, the Ohmic Generator finished its startup sequence completely, instead of throwing up a red flag at some point in the process. And just like that, the lights came back on in the chamber.

Up in the control center, the computer panels all lit up, brightly and cheerfully displaying data like they had before the asteroid hit. He ran to the station operations panel and started shutting down extraneous systems immediately, trying to reduce the power consumption levels before the generator could burn itself out trying to meet the demand.

"This is going to take me a few minutes," he said. "Go ahead and make your way back to the lift. I'm afraid I'll have to shut that system down, so it'll mean a bit more climbing. Just don't start up the ladder until I tell you to. I've got to plan your route and make sure life support is online in each subsequent section."

"Alright, on my way," she said.

Once he'd turned off every system he deemed superfluous, he sat down at the communication officer's panel. "This is Doctor John Smith aboard Mercy medical station in orbit," he said. "We have suffered a catastrophic stellar collision and have survivors. We require immediate assistance." He waited for a reply, but none came. "I say again, this is Doctor John Smith aboard the medical station. We have survivors after an accident and require assistance. Please reply."

Someone should have at least responded by now, he thought. Then a terrible idea struck him. Maybe the station hadn't been evacuated at all... maybe whatever happened to everyone up here had also happened to the population of the planet below. Moving back over to operations, he did a quick scan, but there were millions of humanoid lifeforms on the planet.

Wait. Millions? For a planet advanced enough to build a station like this, there should have been _billions _of inhabitants, not just a fraction. And more than that, there should have been cities lighting up the surface of the dark side of the planet, satellites in orbit, and radio signals of every kind flowing all over the population centers. There should have been a greater concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and more signs of mining operations in the remote areas. He couldn't find any of these.

There was a camera on the outer hull with sufficient magnification to take orbital images, and he fired it up now, trying to confirm his suspicions. He directed it towards the largest population center he could find, and zoomed in as close as he could. It wasn't a great picture, but it was enough to tell the story. A group of primitive shelters stood in a shoddy array on one side of the settlement. Skins had been tanned and laid out to dry in the sun, a few men stood guard on top of the nearby hills with bows and arrows and spears. Whoever had built this station was not on the planet below them. The people down there were barely out of their relative stone age.

Mercy station was in orbit around the wrong planet.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: I'm sorry I didn't post this weekend... I had the flu pretty bad. Here's the weekend's chapter a little late, but look on the bright side... it's closer to the next week's chapter :).**

* * *

He was still staring dumbstruck at the monitor when Quinn called him. "I'm back at the ladder now," she said. "Did you find help?"

"No."

"Um... okay. Are you... going to get some?"

"Not from the planet," he said. "Whoever built this station, they're not the people down there at all," he said.

"I don't get it."

"Cavemen!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Down there, on the planet, they're cavemen. A primitive society. They didn't build this station."

"Then who did? What's it doing here?"

"I don't know. The whole thing is stranger than I'd ever thought possible. And, well, knowing me, that's saying something."

"Alright, nevermind that," she said. "Now that you have power up there, can you open the door from your side and we'll get out of here without a rescue operation?"

"The security protocol on the shutters can't be overwritten until the fusion reactor is running again, and that's impossible with the resources we have aboard."

She sighed. A few minutes ago they'd both felt like they were seconds away from escaping here. Now that they were back at an impasse, Quinn began to worry. What if whatever else they tried didn't work either? What if they couldn't get the Doctor out of there, and he starved to death, or ran out of oxygen? For that matter, what if _she _starved or ran out of oxygen? It had already been hours since she'd had anything to eat, and she was beginning to feel the effects of lower blood sugar. She couldn't last all day on an apple and a ham sandwich anymore; she needed real food at regular intervals. At least she could get to the TARDIS and live there, but how long would it be until loneliness drove her insane, anyway? And what would she do all on her own in four months or so, when...

No. She refused to think that far into the future in this panic-induced freakout. It wasn't going to come to any of that, because she was still here, she was still alive, and so was the Doctor, and she was going to get him out of there and everything would be wonderful.

Only she didn't have the slightest idea how. "Alright, what are we going to do?" she asked, taking a deep slow breath to calm herself.

"You're going to have to get me out of here," he said. "Now that the security systems are up and running again I can see what else is around there. It looks like you've got EVA gear in a storage room up on the level above you. If you can get there and get a laser welder, then you could use it to cut through the bulkhead up here."

"And I suppose that's perfectly safe."

He sighed. "No. It's dangerous equipment that you don't have any training to use. It'll put off a lot of heat, if you look at the beam without eye protection you'll sear your retinas, and even then there's a chance of the unit overheating if the power levels aren't kept strictly in check. It's the sort of thing I'd only ever ask of myself... if we had time."

The comm line was completely silent for a few moments, and he was about to say, 'I'm sorry,' when Quinn spoke up instead. "Okay. I'd better get back there and climb up a level," she said, apparently needing no further persuasion. "Just tell me everything I need to get up there."

"I will, as soon as you get there."

"Okay. And, Doctor... thank you."

"What for?"

"For telling me the truth, even though it hurts. I need that so much right now," she said sincerely.

"You're welcome." He paused a moment, then continued, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for what?"

"For putting you in this situation. I should have turned around as soon as we landed. I'm sorry we're trapped, I'm sorry to ask all this of you. I'm sorry... that your life got so much worse when I came into it."

She didn't respond. "Alright, I'm making my way up now," she said. "I'll call you when I get there."

Fine. Whatever was bothering her earlier was still bothering her, and apparently she didn't want to talk about it. After the conversation they'd had earlier, though, he definitely wasn't going to press her for details now. He had a feeling he knew what this was going to come down to anyway.

He waited five minutes for her to say something more, to indicate that she'd made it. It had only taken her ten minutes to climb down there to begin with. Granted, this time she was fighting against gravity instead of going with it but it was just one level. It shouldn't have taken this long to get back up there. Maybe she'd misunderstood him, gone up more than one level? "Quinn, are you on the next level yet?" No response. "Quinn?" He waited a few moments longer, but she still didn't reply. "Quinn, do you read me? Quinn!" He called for her a few more moments, but after a minute he had to sit down, a feeling of panic washing over him. Quinn had gone completely dark.

_The blast door closed, and that was it. Rose was down there, alone, deep underground in a bunker in Utah, and trapped with a Dalek. _

_A flash of light, and Martha was gone, stumbling out onto a world invaded by Toclafane and subject to the Master's rule._

The images rushed into his head involuntarily - a long slideshow of the people he'd placed in danger. Now what had happened to her? How would he find out? And no matter what it was, how would he help her anyway? What if she had hurt herself, or fallen off the ladder down the turbolift shaft. For that matter, what if the magnetic brakes on the turbo lift itself had lost power and fallen down the shaft? Was there enough clearance between the car and the walls of the shaft for someone hanging on? He didn't particularly want to imagine all of the terrible possibilities that came to mind. His own survival and ability to get out of here didn't even cross his mind until he thought that he now had to get out of here and help her. But how? Every single access port was completely locked down and isolated from the rest of the station - maintenance crawl ways, the main doors, everything. If he had a space suit he could try to breach the viewport and make his way down the outside of the station, but there weren't even any airlocks anywhere else on the hull that he could break into.

This was infuriating! This wasn't what being the Doctor was all about. It was adventure and excitement and helping people. It was about making your own way when no one else would. Being stuck here in the brains of the station and completely unable to do anything... you may as well put him in prison. In fact, this was worse. Even in prison he'd find something to occupy himself with. But in here he felt completely trapped.

He'd been so preoccupied that he didn't notice the static on the radio until it crackled and resolved itself into a voice. "Hello? Who's there? Hello?" The voice was male, possessed of a certain gravelly gruffness, and calm, almost eerily so considering the circumstances.

He scrambled over to the microphone, replying to the transmission. "Hello, yes, this is the Doctor aboard Mercy Station, we need immediate assistance!"

"Simmer down, I know," the voice responded. "I'm on the station too."

"I thought maybe another ship had arrived," he said, glancing over at the proximity monitor to confirm the truth; the station was still completely alone in this sector of space, though he didn't know how much he trusted that reading... it certainly hadn't done any good detecting the asteroid.

"I'm afraid not. Are you alright?"

"Relatively. I'm trapped behind a security door that I can't open until the fusion reactor is online. But my friend, I need you to go and find her! She was climbing the ladder in one of the turbolift shafts when I lost contact with her. She may be injured."

"I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help. I'm locked in as well - automatic quarantine's in effect."

His eyes darted around the control room frantically, looking for an escape route. Even this slight flicker of hope had been snuffed out all too soon. "Why didn't you respond to my earlier distress call?"

"I've just come to. I think I must have taken a tumble or something... my head's throbbing something fierce. D'you know what's happened?"

"The station collided with an asteroid," the Doctor replied. "There are hull breaches all up the central spire, the fusion reactor is offline, and the shields refuse to activate - not even when the rocks were incoming. The entire proximity field has gone kaput, it seems. I radioed for rescue but there's nobody within short range. The planet - there's no way the people down there built this station."

"That can't be."

"But it is. The people down there are in tents and caves, and they're certainly not capable of space flight."

"If we're not around the same planet anymore then something has gone terribly, terribly wrong."

He balled his fists up in frustration, shaking his head to clear it. "This doesn't matter right now. I've got to get out of here and find Quinn! She might be hurt."

"Ah, now there I think I can help you," the voice said. "I've got access to internal security from here... so maybe..."

He held his breath for a few agonizing moments. "Maybe what?"

"Maybe I can find out what happened to her."


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: Apologies if you got multiple email alerts for this story or tried to read it and had any issues. I tried the new copy and paste uploader from my iPad but there were... unforeseen consequences, mainly in terms of formatting. If I can figure out what I did wrong that tool will make posting a lot simpler since I write everything on my mobile devices anyway, but for this chapter I went back to the tried and true method. Y'know, so you could actually read it.**

* * *

"There we go. I've got her on the scanner. She's in one of the turbolifts."

The Doctor looked up from his hands, which he'd covered his face with. "She's alive? She's alright?"

"Hang on a moment. I'm patching in the PA."

A squealing ring rushed through the station for a moment, finally resolving into an open channel. "Quinn, are you alright? It's the Doctor," he said, hearing his own voice echo through the entirety of the station, ringing back and forth through the empty metal corridors.

"Thank God I finally reached you," she said.

"What happened?"

"I had a question for you but I fumbled the radio when I tried to get the thing out of my pocket," she said, grumbling in irritation at her own slip-up. "It's somewhere down at the bottom of the shaft."

"I'm just glad you're alright," he said.

"Yeah, I'm sure," she said, in a tone on the verge of being sarcastic. "Took you long enough to find me. I must have pressed the emergency call button a hundred times."

"It wasn't me," he said. "We've got another survivor with us, who's got control over security internally. He found you," the Doctor told her.

"I don't believe we've been properly introduced, anyway," the voice said. "I'm Dr. Alden Snow, oncologist."

"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor said, "and the charming young woman in the turbolift is my friend, Quinn."

"'The Doctor', hm?" Snow said. "Doctor of what?"

"Oh, a bit of this, a smidgen of that, a dash of the other. I dabble about, mainly."

"Aha," Snow said. "A general practitioner."

"Hmmmmm," the Doctor said, grinning. "I quite like that, actually."

"Guys?" Quinn said. "Not to cut this short but..."

"Quite right," the Doctor said. "Dr. Snow, I'm trying to get Quinn to my location so I can have her cut open this door. Once that's done I can get us all a lift out of here, if that sounds agreeable to you." There was no reply. "Dr. Snow?"

"Er, yes, of course," Snow replied. "Sorry, it's just... well, no, it's probably nothing. Just forget I mentioned it."

"No, no, what is it?"

"Well, I just... when you said that, for a moment I had this feeling... such a strong, what's the word, terror I suppose, that if I left this station I would most certainly die. Just letting my imagination run wild with me I suppose."

"There's no need to worry about all that," the Doctor told him. "We'll be out of here in two shakes."

"About that..." Quinn said tentatively. "There's still that question I had of you."

"Yes?"

"How exactly am I supposed to get a massive cutting laser up the ladder anyhow?"

"Ahh..." he said succinctly. "I... erm..."

"That's why I opened a hatch and climbed in here," she said. "We're going to have to get the turbolifts running if this plan is going to work."

"I tried diverting the power back there but there was a huge drain when I did," the Doctor said. "It must be leaching power somewhere in the system. If I don't want to burn through the little reserve power we've got, I can't switch on the lifts."

"The problem isn't the lifts," Snow told them. "Not directly. It's quarantine."

"What is?" Quinn asked.

"It's an automatic procedure when a bio alert is raised. The affected area is sealed off from the rest of the station, including the turbolift shafts. The lift system looks like its drawing power off the grid but it's not directly. The whole lift system will be cut off if the alert's been raised."

"Cut off how?" the Doctor asked.

"A triple-reinforced airtight bulkhead on both top and bottom of the quarantined deck will close off the entire turboshaft. It'll be statically charged to repel any stray particles and the doors and access points will be shielded with force fields."

"Isn't there any way through?" Quinn asked.

"It's designed so the tiniest microbe can't get through," the Doctor said. "There's no way you'll squeeze through."

"Alright, you don't have to rub it in."

"No, I wasn't, I-"

"There might be a way," Snow said.

"I'm listening," Quinn said.

"There's one access point that can be opened from the command center," Snow said. "A medical practitioner can enter the hot zone in an environment suit. Provided they deem the area clear and it passes a scan, we can lift the quarantine and get the lifts working."

"Okay, what do I-"

The Doctor cut her off. "No," he said simply. "Forget it. Put it out of your head right now because there's no way that's happening. You're not sending my friend into the Grand Central Station of pestilence."

"The danger should be minimal by now. Automated quarantine procedures would have swept the whole area. It'd be opened to vacuum and flushed into space, cleaning robots would take down every piece of equipment and sterilize it in an acid wash, and a gamma ray sweep would be used to kill even the most virulent microbe... all within the span of an hour after outbreak."

"We don't have any idea what happened to the people on board this station," the Doctor said, "let alone how it broke orbit and settled in someplace else entirely. We're not risking her."

"It's the only way," Snow said. "We haven't got a choice."

"There's always a choice. There's always an option. Maybe we can get the teleport working again."

"It's the same story as with the lifts, I'm afraid. They're all disabled until the alert's cleared. In fact until the station's not quarantined, I think you'll find getting off here quite impossible."

"Impossible? Impossible is my middle name! Impossible's what I live for. All I have to do is hotwire the fragment links and..."

"It won't do you a bit of good," Snow said, exasperatedly. "The central computer's offlined all the major systems. It's refused to route power to them on purpose. There's nothing to be done but to lift the alert."

"It's not happening. Forget it!"

"It is happening!" Quinn yelled. "It's happening and there isn't a thing we can do about it. You're the one who brought us here, Doctor! You're the one who didn't turn around and leave when we landed in the wrong place for the hundredth time. But now it's too late, and if we're going to get out of here then I'm doing what needs to be done."

"Quinn, don't. It's still dangerous. I mean, it could be dangerous. Deadly. Don't go. We'll think of something else."

"If you don't want me to go then stop me," she said. There was silence on the line, nobody daring to speak for a few moments, then she said, "That's what I thought. Dr. Snow? How do I get up there?"

"Can you get out of there and onto the ladder again? Take it up two levels and let me know when you get there. I'll direct you to the environment suits."

"And then I'll just have to hope I can squeeze into it."

"They're designed in a sort of one size fits all way," Snow said. "If one of those muscle-bound engineers can manage it I'm sure you can."

"I hope so," she said, opening the floor hatch and swinging her feet out onto the rungs of the ladder again.

"How do you know it'll be safe?" the Doctor asked. "Whatever killed everyone here... how do you know a spacesuit will stop it at all? What if its radiation poisoning or psionics?"

"You said you had power back on up there," she said. "Check those security logs you were all excited about."

He sighed. With Quinn in danger, he'd forgotten. Turning back to the screens, he started pulling up security feeds. If Snow was dead set on sending her in there and she was going to go just to spite him, at least he could determine what she was up against.

The security station was just as he'd found it when he'd tried to pull up the logs several hours ago. Except now there was no imminent doom to distract him. Now there was just a routine waltz through the file servers... only he couldn't pull up any of the security logs from that day. In fact he couldn't pull up any files from that day at all... duty rosters, video files, patient histories, any of it. Every last bit was inaccessible. The files were there, he just couldn't read any of them, like some sort of internal disk error.

"I'm here, Dr. Snow," he was vaguely aware of Quinn saying. "Now what?"

"Straight down the corridor and on your left you'll find the environment suits," Snow replied. The Doctor pulled out the sonic and started running it over the terminal, trying to get the nondescript error repaired with little success. "Then you... uh, that is, you just need to... get the... ungh my head..."

The Doctor looked up, noticing the trouble and putting the sonic back in his brest pocket. "Dr. Snow?" he asked casually. "You alright?"

"Yes, fine," Snow replied. "Just feeling a bit jumbled in the head. I think it's entirely possible I've got a mild concussion."

"Just hold on a bit longer. We're nearly there," he said. "I promise we'll get you out."

"Yes, I... I know. Thank you. Now. The environment suits."

"I found them," she said. "Red space suit things with headlamps?"

"That's them," Snow said.

"How do I put one of these on?"

The Doctor chimed in, "The body should all be one sealed piece - gloves, feet, everything. Step into it from the top."

"Problem. I will never get my baby bump through that tiny neck hole," she said.

"There should be a blue button on the chestplate," he said. "Press that and the magnetic seal on the back disengages."

She did so, and the metallic spine - which she once would have sworn was welded together for how strong it held - split apart and allowed her to step in easily through the shoulders. The legs and arms were accordion-like, almost like dryer hose, allowing it to expand to whatever length limbs the wearer might have... within reason. Kobe Bryant might have had trouble making it but he'd only just be at the upper limit, she guessed. She was just glad she'd opted for slacks today instead of a skirt.

"Hm," she said, looking at it approvingly as she resealed the magnetic back. "Not bad. Slimming even."

"The helmet maglocks on as well," the Doctor said. "Line up the arrows on the front and press the green button. Mind you don't get any hair caught in the seam; even the tiniest breach could compromise the seal."

She did as he said and again the pieces clanked together. "I've patched the PA into the suit radio," Snow said through a pair of speakers inside the helmet. "There's a blue bar inside the helmet for the comm switch. Tap it with your chin to open a channel."

"Check check," she said, nudging the indicated switch. "Anyone reading me?"

"You're comin' through loud and clear," Snow said. "Now all you need is a medical scanner. There should be one in the thigh pouch on the suit.

She pulled open the velcroed compartment and fished out a small hexagonal device with a handle that started taking readings on her surroundings. It beeped, whistled, and whirred happily as it found and counted microbes, spores, and viruses all around her and displayed a rough percentage of contaminated surface areas. There was some microscopic life here and there, the hospital wasn't completely sterile, but nothing the scanner considered harmful.

"Now what?" she asked.

"There's a single occupant lift in the decontamination room," Snow said. "That's your entry point into the hot zone. If you can clear the alert, it's also your way out."

"And if not?"

"Doesn't matter," the Doctor said. "You'll get it."

"Okay," she said, stepping into the tiny elevator, no larger than a phone booth. The door slammed shut and a forcefield sprung up around the tube before the platform started to rise up to the next floor. "Here we go."


	9. Chapter 9

When the lift opened up onto the quarantine deck, Quinn already felt apprehensive. She closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths trying to calm her nerves and dispel the trembling in her knees and arms. What if there really was some terrible plague that had wiped everyone out?

The room she was standing in was lit with a bright blue light, casting an eerie shade on everything. "That's normal," Snow said when she remarked on the color. "A blue alert indicates quarantine breach. Green sections are clear."

"Breach? I thought you said it was contained!" She squeaked.

"It was, until you took the lift in. Now that the lift's been opened to the air on this deck it's part of the quarantine too, until you clear it."

"Just keep taking deep breaths and stay calm," the Doctor told her. "You don't want to hyperventilate in that suit."

She nodded, did as he told her, and made her way towards the door of the chamber. It wouldn't budge. "The door's locked," she said. "Can one of you open it for me?"

"Just wait a moment," Snow said. "The disinfection procedure will kick off first." A lighted sign started to flash on the wall next to the door, with a silhouette of a figure wearing a suit like hers standing under a shower with its arms extended. Looking up, she saw a similar nozzle on the ceiling, so she stood similarly to the figure under the nozzle. A stream of hot water and soap started pouring over the suit, and she had the uncanny feeling of being in a tiny automated car wash. The water stopped, and a puff of some sort of powder descended next. Finally, a red glowing light in the emitter above her head made the arms of the suit feel noticeably warmer for a few seconds. The red and blue mixed into a sickly sort of purple cast on the stark white walls of the chamber. Finally after a few minutes the procedure seemed to be finished, and the door clicked open softly.

There was a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach that had absolutely nothing to do with hormones or morning sickness as she stepped out of the decontamination suite. She was terrified. Sometime after the lift had started moving she'd realized exactly what she was doing. The Doctor said this was a bad idea, he was extremely worried about it, and she'd done it anyway. She'd seen what happened to people who didn't listen to the Doctor, and the results weren't usually good. Most of the time he seemed to know what he was talking about. Why had she agreed to this?

Up in the control room, the Doctor was wondering the same thing. Was she just doing this to spite him? She'd made it pretty clear that she wasn't happy with him lately, and he was reasonably certain he knew why. She resented him for what he'd done back at the colony, and she had probably been weighing the decision of whether to stay or go for a while now. It seemed clear now - she was waiting to tell him that she wanted out. Just like Martha, just like Tegan and Charley, and Lucie after that awful Christmas in Blackpool... he'd pushed her too far, and now she was done. He couldn't really say that he blamed her, if he was being honest.

He ought to be used to this by now, he thought. Nobody stayed forever, and whether it was his idea or theirs, he never kept the same company for very many years. Even so, the thought of her not being there made him acutely aware of a sadness somewhere in his chest, an aching for something that was gone and would never return. Usually he could ignore it, but the thought of being alone in the TARDIS again always made it rear its ugly head.

His home was gone. Sometimes it was easy enough to forget that fact as he engrossed himself in the problems of whatever planet he happened to be on instead, but it was _always _there, at the back of his mind. He could dress it up and parade it around any number of ways - a desire to help other people find the courage and power deep within themselves, to show someone the wonders of the universe, to have a helping hand now and again, to have someone to stop him when he needed it and to show off to when he was being particularly clever, but it was simpler than that. He didn't want to be lonely, but what he wanted wasn't important. They'd get through this and then he'd fulfill his promise, finding her someplace to go.

He'd been making a list of potential planets in his head for a while now... perhaps with the monks of Arkhenin, or on the moon of Bele. It'd have to be someplace he could find her some land, somewhere she could really call her own. Still, with a time machine making sure a nice plot was picked out wasn't too terribly difficult. Maybe one day they'd find the planet in question with the title deed already drawn up.

His wry smile faded. There wouldn't be any "one day". If she wanted to go, then it would be right away, almost immediately. If she wanted to go, then he wouldn't delay her.

"What do I do now?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said quietly, then he snapped out of his reverie. She didn't mean her future, she meant right now. "Er, that is, where are you?"

"It's a medical bay," she said. "Only it looks like they set everything up in a hurry. There's lines and lines of cots. There must be fifty of them." The room looked like it had started its life as some kind of hall or cafeteria. It was hard to put her finger on, but it just didn't feel like a medical room. All the others she'd come across had been filled with medical equipment, screens and tubes and diagnostic equipment and the like. But this was more like a place to keep people until... until what? Until they could be treated? Or just until... the end? "Whatever happened here must have been just awful," she said, unable to shake the feeling that some terrible fate had befallen everyone. "Doctor, what happened to these people?"

"Don't worry about it, Quinn," Dr. Snow said, firmly but kindly. "Just put it out of your mind. If they converted the rest of the station to secondary treatment then the terminal you need will be at the emergency triage station. It'll be under a red banner, it should be easy enough to spot."

She looked all around the room, but there was no red banner, no table, nothing. "I don't see anything apart from the cots," she said.

"That's impossible," Snow said. "The emergency protocols are clear. If quarantine is to be declared on a triage deck, then it must be done from the attending physician's console using their access code. Otherwise there'd be no way to stand down the alert when all is said and done."

"Well there's nothing else here!" she said exasperatedly. "I'm looking all around the room and there's nothing. There's four walls, a ceiling and a floor. I'm not just _missing _it somewhere."

"How many exits are there?" the Doctor asked.

"Two. The door I came through, and another corridor that curves around through the door."

"See what's out there," the Doctor told her.

She stepped tentatively out into the hallway, surprised to discover that she had made her way to the rim of the station without realizing it. The passage was perfectly circular, and the top two thirds of the circle were made of the same glass she'd seen in the corridors at the start of the day. Down here, though, the view was even more breathtaking. If she looked up towards the top of the spire, she couldn't see the metallic floor, and it felt like she was fully immersed in the starry expanse above her. From here she could see even better that the whole station was surrounded by a cloud of the tiny blue sparkles, millions and millions of small, sapphire-colored shards. "Wow," she said, unable to keep the awe out of her voice despite the dire circumstances.

"What is it?"

"Some kind of... observation area," she said. "I can see the whole station from here." She looked up at the spire high above her, where the Doctor and Snow were frantically working to get her back to them. And... something else. "There's something else up there, too," she said, peering up at the shape nestled up to the hull of the station. "It looks like some kind of ship."

"What kind of ship?"

"How should I know?" she snapped. "It's black, it's got wings, and it's up near your side of the station. It looks like it's not far below the command deck."

"Maybe that's what happened," Snow said. "Maybe it's a biological attack?"

"It doesn't make sense," the Doctor said. "Why attack someone and then hang about after the fact? Why move the station? Something doesn't add up here..."

"It's drifting," Quinn said.

"What?"

"The ship, the black one, is drifting. It's not parked, it's circling the spire slowly, almost like the moon around the Earth. I'm not sure but... I don't think anyone's home."

"I can't see what you're talking about," Snow said. "There's nothing out there!"

"Oh, but there is," the Doctor said. "There's another ship out there that might have all the answers about what happened here, and I intend to find out what that answer is."


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N: From the moment I came up with this story, there were three ways it could go. I only just decided a couple days ago which it was going to be, but I've had to leave clues that were open to each of the three possibilities. One of the things I enjoy about Doctor Who is that the character of the Doctor isn't infallable. Sure, he's usually right, but every now and again there's a twist at the end that even he didn't see coming. Sometimes he barks up the wrong tree. It's those times when it's the companion's job to reel him back in, which is what I was going for here.**

* * *

The corridor continued around in a circle surrounding the station, and Quinn stepped through the door at the other end apprehensively. "I still can't find anything that looks like a doctor's station," she said. "Somebody had to be in charge down here."

"Dr. Snow, what else is on that deck?" the Doctor asked.

"Besides the mess? Not a lot. There were some offices... accounting had their offices down there, I think, or maybe it was HR... and then the cargo bays."

"Cargo bays? I didn't think there were any docking points on the whole station."

"There aren't. Everything needed to be teleported aboard - patients and staff, sure, but also all our supplies. There are massive teleport platforms in the cargo bays, to get bigger equipment and supplies into the station and have a place to store them."

Quinn had been following the only path open to her this whole time, and she was now standing outside a large, heavy door. "I think I might be at one of the cargo bays now," she said, checking the sign on the door. "Cargo Bay B."

"Open the door," the Doctor started to say, but Snow shouted over him.

"No! Get out of there," the old man yelled, more emotionally than he'd said anything since they'd met him. "Do not open that door, whatever you do! It isn't safe, isn't safe..."

"What is it, Dr. Snow?" the Doctor asked.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no," Snow whimpered. Great, Quinn thought. He picked this moment to turn into a lunatic. "Mustn't go in there, mustn't look..." Quinn didn't notice that anything had been different until the change happened, but as Snow continued to whimper the light in the room she was standing in suddenly shifted to become blue, like the rest of the deck had been. As soon as that happened, a heavier blast door slammed shut over the door she'd been about to open, and she took a started jump backwards.

"Doctor!" she called. "Whatever this thing is, it's in this room! The lights just changed!"

"Something's wrong," the Doctor said. "Something isn't adding up here." He drummed his fingers on the security panel, thinking, and then asked, "What does the scanner say?"

"What?!"

"The scanner! The medical scanner you're carrying, what does it say about the room?"

"It says..." she peered at the device. It hadn't changed one bit since she picked it up. The readings were identical. "It says nothing's wrong," she said. "But maybe it can't detect whatever it is."

"They're the same scanners," the Doctor said. "Diagnostic units are the same, hand held or not. If that scanner says the room is clean then there's no way the alert should have been tripped. None!"

"So what does that mean?"

"That someone or something triggered the alert manually." Quinn tried to wrap her head around the idea. Who would do such a thing? Who would be capable of it? "This is just too much coincidence," the Doctor continued. "Ever since we got here it's been one disaster after another. We show up for a simple visit, and there's not a soul to be found. Then the station's damaged by an asteroid, even though the shields should have seen it coming miles away. The whole thing gets shut down and conveniently, we can't power it up again. The command deck's locked off completely; if there hadn't been someone already in here the whole thing would still be shut down. And then, just when we're on the verge of finally making it out of here, you show up, Dr. Snow, sending us off on some tangent about quarantine protocols."

Snow didn't respond. He just kept muttering about some kind of danger.

"What does all this mean?" Quinn asked.

"This station isn't behaving rationally, not by a long shot," the Doctor said. "In fact if I didn't know any better I'd say it was depressed, manic, trying to kill itself."

"Space stations get depression?"

"It's not exactly common, no," he said. "But it won't even let me review the security logs to see what happened here. Somehow this station is in denial."

"No, no, no," Snow muttered. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, just don't go on. Don't go on. Don't go in there."

"And look who finally grew a conscience!" the Doctor said, and even so far away Quinn could hear the sneer on his face, the same one he got whenever someone had done something that completely disgusted him. "What'd you do, lay a trap for us?"

"No..."

"What are you after?"

"Nothing! I haven't done anything!"

Something still wasn't right. There was something she couldn't quite put her finger on, something about the quarantine deck she'd seen so far. What was it?

"And worse still," he Doctor continued, "you killed everyone on this station to do it! Staff, patients... it's clear they were set up to deal with an epidemic of huge proportions. How many people? How many lives?"

"Doctor..." Quinn said, hoping he'd get the message, but he barreled on with a full head of steam. Suddenly it hit her. The Doctor said that so many people had died from whatever plague had swept through the station. But if that was the case, if thousands of people had really suffered and died here, then why were all the beds neatly made? It didn't look like any of them had even been slept on.

"When did you start calling yourself Alden Snow, anyway?" he asked. Dr. Snow had long since stopped denying anything. Now the poor man was openly weeping. "I'll find out what you're doing, I'll stop it, and then I'll make sure you never harm another living thing in the universe if I have to dismantle every single code block myself!"

"Doctor, stop it!" He'd been going on and on about the deaths, and that's when she realized it...

"No," he replied. "I'm taking this computer down. Because that's who you are, right Dr. Snow? You're the onboard computer system for Mercy Station!"

Quinn rolled her eyes and lunged for the door controls, flinging the doors of the cargo bay open wide. "Doctor, SHUT UP!"

Up on the control deck, an indicator cheerfully yellow to indicate that the door had opened. The Doctor stopped his diatribe to look over at the panel. "Quinn, no!"

It even seemed to snap Dr. Snow back to consciousness. "Get out of there. It's not safe!"

She stepped through the door to the cargo deck, coming out on a narrow gantry overlooking the bay below. It was huge, bigger than a football field and about twice as tall as the gymnasium back at school. Just like the cafeteria, the entire place had been converted to a triage facility, with lines and lines of cots. And she'd been right, about what she noticed earlier. Just like the ones in the cafeteria, they were all perfectly clean and perfectly made. Not a single one had been slept in. "It's alright," she said. "Doctor, the cots.'

"What about them?"

"Nobody's used one. If there were really a sickness, if Dr. Snow had really plotted to kill everyone with some disease or something, then wouldn't they all have been used?" There was silence on the line. Quinn descended the metal framework stairs and sat on one of the cots, stroking the smoothness of the blanket. The quiet was broken by another round of quiet sniffles from Dr. Snow. "Dr. Snow?" she prompted quietly and tenderly. When he didn't respond, she tried a more personal touch. "Alden, what happened?"

"I... I can't say..."

"Yes you can."

"No, please, don't make me think of it..."

"Alden," the Doctor said, his voice soft again, "where are you?"

"At a security panel," he replied. "Like I told you."

"And where is that panel?"

"What?"

"Where is it? Where on the station?"

"It's on the command deck."

"No, it's not," the Doctor said.

"Of course it is! I think I know my own whereabouts by now."

"I'm sure," the Doctor said. "But I'm on the command deck. And you're not here."

"No, but... that can't be."

"Alden, I'm standing on the command deck, right next to the security station. And I'm quite alone."

"But..."

"Can you see the planet from where you are?"

"Yes, of course. It's right outside the window, clear as day."

"What color is it?"

"Red! Just like it's always been."

"This station is in orbit around a brown planet," the Doctor said. "And furthermore the entire station is surrounded by a cloud of tiny sapphire particles."

"There's nothing out there," Snow insisted. "Just clear space! Nothing! This is ludicrous!" he sputtered. "I'm not listening to any more of this."

"Doctor Snow," the Doctor said, "how long has Mercy station been in operation?"

"What? What does it matter?"

"Just curiosity," the Doctor said.

"Well, now, I... let's see. I've been here about five and a half years, give or take a couple months, and I think the station had been built about a decade before that, so..."

"Computer, state system uptime," the Doctor said, interrupting.

Snow stopped speaking mid-sentence and, slipping into a slight monotone, said, "Sixteen years, five months, twenty-one days, ten hours, four minutes and fifty-eight seconds." Then he gasped, seeming surprised at what he'd just said.

"Nobody measures time that accurately," the Doctor said. "No living thing, not unless you're a Time Lord. That response was pure mechanical precision. Just like a computer."

"No, no, no! You're mistaken! I am _not _a machine! My name is Doctor Alden Snow. I'm a medical oncologist assigned to Mercy Station. I treated hundreds of patients over the course of an illustrious career until..."

"Until what?"

"I..."

"I know it's painful," the Doctor said. "But you have to remember! What happened here?"

"No. I don't want to... think about it! Leave! Just leave me to it! I can handle this myself. I don't need anyone!"

"We can't leave until this lockdown is lifted, and that can't happen until you remember. You _have _to remember!"

"Just leave me be! Let me rest!"

Quinn sat cross-legged on the cot, hands folded in her lap. Beneath the transparent face mask, tears had begun to fall. She understood what it was like to have painful memories you didn't want to turn back to. Her heart broke for Dr. Snow with every harsh, ragged breath he took. "Doctor, don't force him! There's nothing he can do!"

And then, taking a deep breath to calm himself, Snow said through a quiet, still-shaky voice, "Oh God. Oh my God. I am Dr. Alden Snow. I am human, I'm an oncologist, I am a physician at Mercy Station. And... I remember."

6


	11. Chapter 11 - Flashback Part I

**FIFTEEN MONTHS EARLIER:**

Dr. Snow smiled at Mrs. McMillan as he handed her the pamphlet. "That explains all about the procedure," he said, looking to the machines on the wall of the small room and making a note in her file. "Now based on this reading you have a mid-sized growth on your right lung. Did Dr. Martin explain that to you?" She nodded. Her family doctor had noticed the anomaly on a recent scan and referred her to Dr. Snow only last week. "Good," Snow said. "I don't anticipate any issues. Tumors of this kind have been successfully removed for centuries now. It's the sort of thing they might even have operated on a few centuries ago."

"But not for me?"

"Oh, good heavens no," he said with a slight chuckle. "There's almost never any cause to cut into a living body these days... so uncivilized and barbaric. Can you imagine? And yet there was a time when the equivalent of trained monkeys did it all day and considered themselves to be on the cutting edge, if you'll pardon the pun."

Mrs. McMillan wasn't really listening. She lay in her hospital bed going over the pamphlet, reading about her upcoming treatment in minute detail. "Five weeks? That seems rather a long time to be unconscious," she said.

"But when it's all said and done you'll feel the most refreshed you ever have in your life," he countered. She seems unconvinced. "Okay, look," Snow said, taking a seat by her bedside. "I know it seems inconvenient. But it's the best treatment plan ever conceived. The reason cancer was such a problem in the past was because doctors just couldn't find it all. A few cells here or there escape treatment and soon, it's back again. The treatment takes time but its effective - 94% of patients make it to a ripe old age still in remission."

"I know," she said. "I'm still scared. What are Jason and the kids going to do without me for so long?"

"Now, now," he replied, patting her on the shoulder. "Don't fret. Just bill it as an extended vacation. That's basically what it is."

She sighed. "Explain it to me once more? Please?"

"Of course." He turned one of the screens to face the bed and pulled up a diagram. "Malignant cells divide the same way regular cells do," he said. "And in fact it's not uncommon for a damaged cell to exist, even in a healthy body. For some reason, though, the body doesn't recognize the cancerous cells and destroy them, and they're allowed to spread. Even when a mass is removed, whether it's done surgically or with radiation, there's a chance that some cancerous cells will evade detection and stay in the body, allowing them to start growing and dividing again. Even if they're all wiped out, if the cause is genetic or environmental, a new tumor can start. Treatments of the past focused on removal of existing malignant cells, but now we know enough to cure the disease and prevent recurrence."

"But I still don't understand why it will take so _long_, doctor."

"The treatment starts by taking a sample of your DNA, once that we can verify is unaffected. We feed that information over a short range data feed to a supply of nanogenes and inject them into the bloodstream. At that point we also put you into a medically induced sleep state, so that the little guys can do their work unimpeded." The display changed, showing a sample of one of the subatomic robots at work. It approached a cell, flashed a tiny light at it making the whole thing translucent for a fraction of a second, then moved on to another, and another, and another. "The nanogenes will check every single cell in your entire body, sweeping their way up from the soles of your feet to the tips of your hair and reporting its results for each one back to the server. Those that are OK, it leaves alone. Those that aren't, it either resequences the genetic code based on the template we fed it earlier, or if the cell is already damaged, it vaporizes them." On the screen a brown festering cell was hit with a blue beam and completely vanished. "They're remarkable efficient," he said. "Each one can about one and a half million cells a day, but even so it's slow going."

"I still can't imagine being out for so long."

"You'll need some minor physical therapy after the treatment is over," he said, nodding. "Five weeks of complete immobility will take some recovery but it should be uncomplicated at your age."

"What will it be like? Will I dream or... or be aware of the time at all?"

"Better than that. You'll be on holiday." He pulled up yet another menu on the screen and swiveled it out over her bed. "We don't drug you to put you out. We'll stream a constant pulse of alpha waves at your brain to keep you under, and send your mind on a virtual vacation while you undergo the treatment." A screen full of thumbnails popped up before her, looking like picturesque postcards. "Pick one, read up on them. There's parasailing, an arts and culture tour, sipping tropical beverages on the beach by a blue ocean, cave diving on Phobos... and each one feels like you're really there. You won't want to wake up, I promise."

"That's not, er, entirely comforting," she replied with a nervous chuckle.

"You're going to be fine, I promise! I'll check in on you tomorrow morning," Snow said as he ducked out of the room.

"You were in a hurry to get out of there," Vincent said, putting away the chart he was entering notes into and falling into step behind the other doctor. "Mrs. McMillan giving you trouble again?"

"No, no, of course not," he replied. "I certainly don't begrudge the woman a few questions about her treatment... no matter how many times she asks them," he said, grumbling a bit over the last part of the sentence. "She'll want to see you tomorrow sometime, by the by. She's about to pick a holiday for her treatment."

"Of course," he said, making a serious face and saluting. "It's my solemn duty. Dr. Vincent Green - cognitive neuroscientist by day, booking agent by night."

"You're the one who created the technology," he said. "Don't be bitter now that it's taken off."

"So she's driving you spare, is she? What's the matter? Is she one of those who can't pick one, wants us to wake her every week and switch scenarios?"

"No, it's just that I have somewhere... rather pressing to be."

"Uh-huh," Vincent said, smiling cheekily. "Somewhere like, oh, I dunno, just picking any old random place at random... the mess?"

"Mm? Oh, uh, yes, possibly."

"I see, I see. So it's not that you're disinterested in your patient - far from it. But what then? Hmmmmm. Perhaps you need to speak to accounting about your missing direct deposit?"

"No, nothing's wrong with my account."

"HR, then? Maybe you've been the victim of workplace discrimination?"

"No, not that either."

"Another patient to see?"

"Mrs. McMillan was my last one."

"Oh, dearie me, we're running out of options here. Unless... no! Could it be that Alison Martin, the new nutritionist, is known to take lunch at about this time?"

"Well... now that you mention it, I had entertained the idea of maybe, possibly, potentially seeing her there at about this time, yes."

"By Jove, Watson, I think we've solved it!" Vincent said, adopting a ridiculous accent and twirling an invisible mustache.

"Alright, yes," Snow said. "If you absolutely must know, we shared a dance at the hospital fundraiser last week and I've been considering spending a bit more time with her."

"Oh yeah? Was she amazing? Everything you dreamed of and more?" Vincent replied, hugging his chart to his chest and blinking bashfully.

"Shut up, it's not like that," Snow said, smacking him on the shoulder. "Though I know you'll find it hard to believe it considering your juvenile mindset, in this instance, 'dance' wasn't a crude euphemism for anything."

"Yeah, knowing you I'll bet it wasn't," Vincent said. "But... ooh, hold on," he said, pulling a penlight out of his pocket and waving it in Snow's face and making 'beep-beep' noises with his mouth.  
"My BS detector's reading is off the chart. You've been sniffing around that tree for a _lot _longer for a week my friend."

"I can neither confirm nor deny this to be the case," Snow said, pressing for the lift.

"That's okay. I can."

"Have a great day, Vincent," Snow said, entering the lift and letting the door close without turning around the face the younger man.

"Make me proud!" he called just as the door slid shut. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do! Not that there's not much I wouldn't do but-" the door closed and cut him off.

Lunch was just as disappointing as it had been every day since he'd arrived here. Absolutely nothing was allowed aboard the station that could present a bacteriological growth medium, so all meals were reduced some sort of paste-like substance. Each one had a flavor that was almost, but not entirely, unlike food.

Fortune smiled on him today, though, because he arrived just in time to see Dr. Martin pick up a tray and slide a few of the reheated paste trays onto it. He slipped ahead of the two people between himself and her, to their annoyed protestations, and quickly slapped a few onto his own tray. "Let's see," he said. "I believe I'll have some green, yellow, and red today."

"How positively Etheopian of you," she replied.

"Hm?"

"Never mind. Have a good one, Dr. Snow," she said, making her way towards a table in the corner.

He stood, stunned for a moment. The conversation couldn't be over already! And with a courage he didn't really feel, he followed her towards the table. "What do you think the nutritional value of any of these is, anyway?" he asked. "You know, you being the nutritionist and all."

"Relatively abysmal," she said. "That's why everyone's on a strict vitamin regimen too."

"Ah," he said. "Yes," he followed up. And finally, he closed with, "I see."

She was looking at a datapad - most likely a book she was reading, or a medical journal. Either way, she wasn't looking up at him.

He looked out at the stars, and the planet turning majestically below them. "Space sure is nice today," he said.

This at least garnered some reaction. She put the book down and looked up at him. "You have to know how ridiculous that sounded," she said.

"Yeah, it was kind of horrible," he replied.

"Look, Alden," she said. "It's obvious what's going on here," she said. "It's been going on far too long." He took a deep breath as inconspicuously as he could. Here it came. Rejection in 3, 2, 1. "Stop beating about the bush," she continued. "If you want to see me socially, ask if I want to have coffee sometime. I'm very likely to say yes."

"Only likely?"

"Very likely. It all depends upon how you ask," she said, and smiled warmly. "So go on, give me your best shot."

He returned the smile. "Alison, would you like-"

But he was interrupted by a blaring alarm and a flashing light. "Incoming patients," someone called over the intercom. "Red alert! All personnel to emergency triage stations!"

"Gotta go," she said, forgetting her lunch and book. "Things to do, people to see."

"Urh..."

"Walking away now," she said, not looking over her shoulder. "Now would be the perfect time for a complete sentence."

"Coffee! With me. You. Friday?"

"That was a grammatic disaster," she said, turning and flashing him a smile. "But sure. See you then!"

5


	12. Chapter 12 - Flashback Part II

**A/N: I'm a bad author! I uploaded last week's chapter to the doc manager… and forgot to publish it! Sorry! There are a few more chapters and then this story's done… and to be honest I'll be glad. It's not turning out to be one of my favorites. I'm really excited for the next one but I'm not sure I'll be able to carry it to the length I want, so we'll see. I'm trying not to panic.**

**Anyway, with this chapter Flashback Time ends, so we're back to the present starting next chapter. Maybe I'll try to post it midweek to make up for my snafu last week. Sorry!**

* * *

There was precious little time to enjoy his victory, however sweet. A triage alert was about the most panic inducing event imaginable aboard the station. The majority of their work was routine - a steady stream of patients both from the planet and from visiting ships seeking day-to-day treatment. But if something happened out there, if a ship was attacked, or there was an industrial accident on the planet, then Mercy was often the only place they could go for help. And that meant everyone would be working double, maybe even triple shifts with patients lining the hallways in fold-out cots just trying to deal with the huge influx of sick or wounded. There'd be no laughing and joking with patients, no witty rapport with the other doctors. Everything that made this job seem tolerable would be gone. The station was about to be plunged into its own living hell.

Every staff member had an assignment for this situation, and as head of the Oncology department Dr. Snow was to report to the command center to be briefed on the situation. Nurses and doctors down on the lower decks would be preparing every available space for sick beds. Collapsible cots would be rolled out of storage and set up all over the common areas. Respirators would be issued to every staff member and patient. Until they knew what they were dealing with, every possible precaution would be taken.

The ride up in the turbolift was tense. Everyone was on edge and nervous about the days ahead. And while, as a doctor, none of them ever wished any brand of harm on a patient whatsoever, it was something of an unspoken guarantee that everyone was hoping for some manner of accident or attack, simply because the last thing anyone wanted to deal with was the outbreak of a disease aboard the station. A bad enough scenario could effectively take the station out of commission for months - first to cure the infected, then to sterilize the whole place. Each and every piece of small equipment, right down to the cotton balls and bandages, would be collected by hand. Durable equipment would be sterilized nine ways from Sunday. Everything else would be fired out into space and detonated by a nuclear blast. Finally the whole station would be evacuated, opened to vacuum, and irradiated to kill off every last living cell. In the entire time the station had been in orbit - nearly 60 years - it'd only happened once, and they all prayed it would never come to that again.

The command center was a bustle of activity as the doors to the lift opened. The conference room off to the side was vacant - in full crisis mode like this the chief of medicine wouldn't be leaving his post for anything. Instead the department heads gathered around a table by the central command chair. He made eye contact with each of them as they arrived, his face a picture of grim determination.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're under full alert as of thirteen hundred hours," Malone said. "A freighter on its way back from a mining run encountered a vessel of unknown origin. The craft had suffered a hull breach, and was broadcasting a distress signal on repeat, but nobody answered repeated calls for assistance."

"Dead?" Dr. Martin from obstetrics asked.

"No. The freighter's crew boarded the other ship to affect a rescue. The ship fired on them when they tried to dock. At that point someone finally got on the horn with them and told them to leave. Damn fool said they should destroy the ship, head for home and not look back. Well, the freighter captain thought that sounded like madness, and so he's towing the ship back here for treatment."

"What's the crew complement?"

"Four dozen crew, a few passengers and some contracted miners. They were picking ore out of the cave system of some moon and bringing it to Faril."

"Faril?" Snow said, slightly bewildered. "Then they were way off course. That's light years in the opposite direction."

"I don't know," Malone replied. "All we know is what's on their official charter, because nobody's talking. I want a general anisthetic applied to the air supply in all patient areas, so make sure your staff are all using their respirators. If these people are dangerous I want them subdued."

* * *

The Doctor watched the proceedings on the security monitor. Once Snow had started to remember, the encryption had finally broken and he could see the security footage. "The ship Quinn saw," he said. "Is that the ship the freighter towed in?"

"Yes, it's orbiting the central spire now."

"Why, I wonder..."

"What do you mean?" Quinn asked.

"If the ship is adrift, it should just sail on past us. It certainly wouldn't fall into orbit."

"I'm getting to that," Snow said.

* * *

The patients from the towed ship had been brought aboard the station, and treatment was beginning. None of them had spoken a word to any of the staff. They just lay on their cots, staring blankly ahead no matter what you did or said to them. No stimuli produced a response - not light, not dark, not sound, not heat. Not even pain garnered any reaction whatsoever. Malone had come down from the command deck to the cargo bay to see how everything was progressing.

"Any update?" He asked.

Dr. Snow stood up from the bed he'd been kneeling by. "It's hard to say. We haven't the foggiest what's causing the disease - if it is a disease." He held the patient's arm aloft. "There are some hard deposits under the skin. I'd like to biopsy one with your permission."

"Yeah, of course."

"And... I want to take one of the patients off the lithium carbonate."

"The mood stabilizer? No way. The last thing we need is these folks attacking the staff."

"Just one, Stu," Snow said. "We can restrain him. We'll keep him isolated from the rest of the population. But we need to know what happened to them if we're to devise a treatment. And this," he said, holding the patient's arm up and letting it drop without the man on the cot registering that anything was happening at all, "is not how we find out. It's not working."

Malone sighed, weighing the options. "I don't like it very much," he finally said, "but since you're taking him for a biopsy anyway... do it. In fact we may as well do a full MRI workup."

"Thank you," Snow said.

"You want to thank me, make sure I don't regret breaking quarantine procedures."

"You won't. Well save these people. You'll see."

"I hope so, yeah. Because if we don't, I'll be in front of a review board faster than you can say Amoxicillin and you'll be looking for a job flipping burgers."

"No pressure then."

"As always. I'll be on the command deck. Let me know what you find."

They moved the patient to the diagnostic bay to run a full spectrum scan on him. Snow strapped his arms lightly to his side as they lowered him onto the exam table. "Stop the mood stabilizer," he said, and slight hiss of the gas coming through the air vents stopped in the room.

"Mood stabilizer is stopped," the scan tech confirmed, removing his respirator. "Air's clean now, at least in this room." He rubbed his face where the straps had been a moment before. "I've been in that thing for hours. I can't feel my face anymore."

Snow looked at him sternly. "You really ought to have that on until I'm done with the biopsy," he said.

"What's the harm? The scanner's not showing any airborne pathogens."

"Live by the sword and die by the sword," Snow replied. "If you trust the machines to do the whole job, they'll fail you sometime or other. Being a doctor's a lot more than just waving scanners around and injecting nanobots. Never forget the personal touch."

"Yeah, sure."

Snow gave a mental sigh. Another young know-it-all. "Just help me with the biopsy," he said. The tech held the arm aloft. Snow felt for one of the masses under the patient's skin, then picked up a syringe with a large needle. The mass wasn't even slightly pliant, though. Try as he might he couldn't get the needle in. When he finally withdrew it, the tip had been crushed. "That's not possible," he muttered.

"What's not?" the tech asked. Snow held the needle aloft and the younger man peered at it. "What the hel-?" he said, interrupted by a sudden coughing fit.

"You alright, son?"

The tech waved him off. "Fine. I'm just dry from the respirator."

Snow changed the needle and tried a different spot. This time it went in. It required a lot of force and he wasn't sure he wouldn't end up snapping it off, but it did go in. He pulled the plunger back and was surprised to get a substance almost like sludge, but which was clearly blood. It looked almost as if were partially frozen.

"Get this sample down to diagnostics," he said. "See if they can ID it."

The tech replaced the respirator and took the sample down to the lab. Snow, meanwhile, turned on the MRI. Enclosing the patient in a little tube was a thing of the past. A small magnetic field generator was all that was necessary, and all the equipment was stored under the table. He stepped into the control booth and activated the scan. The images that started to come up on the screen weren't very high quality, so he pressed the intercom button and said, "Try to stay as still as possible." It took a moment to realize, none of the patients had moved much more than blinking their eyes. Maybe the patient was regaining consciousness. He shut the scanner off midway through and ran back to the table.

"Where am I?" his patient asked.

"You're alright, you're aboard Mercy Station. We're looking after you and your crew."

"Mercy... no... NO!" He was slowly coming to his senses, but it was clearly difficult for him to put his thoughts into words. "No, get us off!"

"Off... you want off the exam table?"

"No! Me and my crew, get us off the station! Whatever it is, it's contagious!" He started struggling against his bonds. "Let me out of here!"

"The restraints are for your own protection," Snow said. "The freighter captain said you fired on his-"

"That idiot! I told him to leave us! Listen to me, I'm not crazy. Something killed the miners, and it's aboard the ship, my ship, and now it's aboard this station. We mined an asteroid... check the flight logs... make sure it's destroyed!"

"Calm down! We're taking care of you. We'll figure out what it is, and we'll find a cure for you, I promise."

"No, you don't understand, it moves too fast. Everyone here is at risk. Anyone could be infected. All it takes is a piece. Just a little piece."

"A piece of what? What happened?"

"The mineral... the crystals we were mining. If you touch one, if you come in contact with it, it does... things. It changes you."

"Changes you how?"

"It's deadly. Aaaagh!" He cried out in pain, his back arching like he was having a terrible spasm.

"Tell me more. Everything helps. What are the symptoms?"

"This!" the patient said, holding his hand as high as the restraints would allow. Snow's mouth fell open and he leaned forward to examine the hand, but the man snatched it away. "Keep back I tell you! Get out of here! It's too late!"

The hand was covered in tiny mineral deposits. Small blue crystals seemed like they were poking right through the skin, and they were growing right before his eyes. With a sound like grinding glass, the crystals spread up the arm of the patient, with more and more tiny little shards sprouting from the skin like so many tiny knives. And as Snow watched in horror, the man's entire body was slowly taken over by the crystals, and he shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, like grains of blue sand had been strewn all over the exam table and floor.

He scrambled backwards out of the room and pressed a large red button on the opposite wall. As soon as he did so, red lights started flashing and an automated voice announced, "Biohazard alert. Biohazard alert. This station is now on lockdown." The teleport pods were shut down immediately to stop any traffic in or out.

Snow found the comm panel on the wall and called up to the command center. "The patients are undergoing a mutagenic change at the cellular level. Increase to maximum quarantine levels across the station, especially in the cargo bay! Does anyone read me?"

All he got back were the sounds of screaming and shattering crystal.

Snow ran back towards the cargo bay. He had to seal it off, it was the only hope. Coming around a corner he literally ran into Dr. Green. "Vincent! Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm fine!"

"Have you had any contact with the patients?"

"No, nothing. I was in the AR Suite when I heard the alert."

"We have to get back to the cargo bay and lock it down," Snow said.

"It's too late. I already heard one of the nurses screaming for help. The transformation's started there too."

"And the staff are already infected. The command center's already compromised."

"Come on, then. We're all making for the escape pod at the base of the station."

"We can't do that. Any of us could be infected."

"The scanner's not detecting anything on anyone!"

"Because it's not a disease, or at least not a biohazard. It's a mineral, some kind of mineral," he said. "I don't really know. But the scanners only look for biological infestations. They'd never alert us to this."

"They could be reconfigured," Vincent said. "It's basic computer operation. I can do it if we get back to my office."

Snow nodded. "If everyone in the escape pod is clean then we can abandon and destroy the station." The two men jogged back to Vincent's office. Vincent got right to work on the scanner modifications while Snow sealed the door and the emergency bulkhead. "That should hold for a while," he said. "As long as nobody opens that door we'll be safe."

"I got it," Vincent said a few minutes later. "I'm doing a full scan of the area now." A schematic of the station appeared on the monitor. Huge sections of the station were now shaded red, indicating that they were contaminated. The corridors leading into the escape pod were all contaminated, but the people inside were clean. "Escape pod one, this is Vincent Green, do you read me?"

"We're here," a female voice replied.

"Dr. Martin?" Snow asked.

"Yes, it's me! There are nine of us in here but we can't eject until we get clearance!"

"That's going to be a problem," Snow said. "Nobody on the command deck survived."

"We can access the network but there's no way to implement the commands from here," Vincent said. "And if the crew complement drops below the minimum safe level, then the computer will automatically initiate cleanup."

"That's the worst thing that could happen," Snow said. "The cleanup procedure will vent all the crystals into space. If even one crystal made its way down to the planet..."

"...the entire population would be killed," Vincent said, finishing his thought. "We have to stop it."

Both men sat thinking for a minute. "In the AR sims... there's a sim of the station isn't there?"

"Yeah, there is," Vincent said. "I used it to calibrate the system."

"So, if you networked the station command system together with an AR simulation of the command deck... would the AR system fool the computer into thinking the instructions were really coming from the command deck?"

Vincent shook his head. "Maybe, but someone would have to issue commands from inside the simulation."

"Leave that to me," Snow said, strapping on an AR helmet.

"You'll have time to release the escape pod or stop the cleanup, but not both."

"So, I'll stop the cleanup and _then _release the escape pod."

"If you stop the cleanup procedure then full lockdown goes into effect, and you'll never launch that pod."

"I have to release them, I can't let them die."

"Then how are you going to save the planet?"

"Is the engineering deck still clean?"

"Parts are, yes," Vincent said.

"Get down there and extend the artificial gravity field around the station. Whatever gets outside, we'll trap."

"No, I have to stay here to unplug you from the simulation."

"I can stay in there, I'll be fine."

"No you can't! You'll dissociate in a matter of hours. You won't remember it's a sim."

"Then you better come back and get me out. We'll find a way off. Go on, there's not much time."


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N: So, I've been bad again. I hoped to get a chapter out on Wednesday to make up for the late one last week. That didn't happen.**

** I have to face a very real and unfortunate fact. I am the slowest writer who ever wrote. I'm basically a paragraph a night sort of guy. This chapter below here? I JUST finished writing it a few minutes ago. Just as perspective, the first story _Harmony_ was almost done except for a few chapters when I started posting it, and the second story was pretty much complete by the time I started posting it up.**

**Part of it, as I said, is that I am not highly motivated with this story. Writing it has started to feel like a chore because it lost so much momentum in the middle there. I'm sure its the weakest of the series and I only hope I haven't lost a ton of readers because of it. The next story is also light on action, but hopefully will feature a lot stronger characters, and it has a very real and eminent threat for the Doctor to take on, albeit in an indirect way. But even when I am motivated, I still don't tend to get much more than a few paragraphs per writing session as I antagonize over every word, trying to make it perfect. That's my thing, but the readers shouldn't be kept in suspense because of it. **

**Additionally, I personally can't write chapter-to-chapter, because as I get to a point where I'm starting to work out new ways the plot could unfold, I have to go back and place the little clues in ahead of time so you can find them if you're looking. It's just how I've always written, doing the big scenes I know are going to take place and then filling in the rest in between.**

**All of this is to say that after this story finishes the series will probably take a brief hiatus of about a month while I try to fill in a backlog of stuff that's already written and then return when I can be back to writing well ahead of what I'm posting. There are no guarantees, of course. I started employing Write or Die a couple days ago and despite my skepticism, it's really a useful tool for keeping me on track. So while we'll hope everything can just go on as planned, don't be totally shocked or despondent if you don't see the next story appear right after this one finishes... I promise it will show up eventually, and it won't be anywhere near as long as it took 11 to get back to Amy. Thanks as always to everyone who's supported me, your reviews keep me going!**

* * *

"You sacrificed yourself," the Doctor said, with a hint of awe in his voice."

"I did what I had to do, to get everyone off the station in time," Snow replied.

"I still don't understand what happened in the first place," Quinn said. "Was it a disease?"

"I'm not sure," Snow said. "I never got the results back. All I know is it spread quickly, and once it started there was no stopping it."

Up in the control room, the Doctor was reviewing the footage from the MRI room a second time. "My guess is it's some kind of organism. Mineral-based, probably monocellular colonies. It didn't have any idea what it was doing, probably no more intelligent than your average amoeba."

"What was it, though? Where did it come from? Have you ever seen anything like it?"

"Best guess... It's a self-replicating crystalline structure. Starts off as just one single little cell, but then once it enters the bloodstream it messes about with the solubility of the surrounding tissue. Body temperature plummets and all the minerals in the body start to crystallize. Iron, manganese, zinc, cobalt, selenium, iodine, fluorine, sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, every last bit, until the whole structure just collapses in on itself. Pretty soon it can't even support its own weight and the whole thing just... shatters. But you saved them. You saved the rest of the staff, and you saved everyone on the planet below. Most of the cells would have vaporized upon entry into the atmosphere but if even a single one had made it, then eventually the whole planet would have been stripped of fauna."

"What about the freighter that towed them here?"

"Who knows?" the Doctor said. "If they got a crystal anywhere aboard their ship then they'd suffer the same fate, eventually."

"That's terrible," Quinn said quietly. She stood up from the cot she was sitting on, beginning to pace around the cargo bay, frustrated and full of the desire to just do something, though she wasn't sure what it was.

"I know," the Doctor said quietly. "Sometimes there's no evil to fight, no plan to thwart or no tyrant to overturn. Sometimes, there's just circumstances to be overcome."

"It's still not fair."

"No, it's not," he agreed.

They were all silent for a few minutes as they pondered what to do from here. Finally Quinn spoke again. "What happened to Dr. Green? Did he get out alive?"

"I don't know," Snow said. "I never saw him again."

"I found him," the Doctor said grimly as he watched security footage from the engineering deck Quinn had been on a few hours before. "He extended the gravity field to surround the station, just like he said he would, but that shifted the orbit. There was a chance that he could crash into the planet, which was the last thing they wanted. So he went into an infected area to fire the thrusters, move the station out of the planet's orbit. He managed it, just in time."

Snow made a strangled sort of sound over the comm. It sounded like he was barely keeping his emotions in check. Quinn couldn't say she blamed him. He'd done all this to protect his friends and his planet, literally losing his mind in the process (albeit temporarily). Then they'd shown up, and ruined everything. At least he'd been happy.

"It all makes sense, now," the Doctor said. "The station probably drifted all that time until it came in contact with a larger planetary body. The enhanced gravity field caused it to be captured in the gravity well and fall into orbit instead of crashing. For that matter that's probably what caused the asteroid to hit us in the first place, the higher gravity. It was all just a bit too coincidental to make sense otherwise. When it did that it probably shocked the system, causing the fusion reactor to blow its safety limits and shut down. In fact all the systems have been behaving erratically since we got here. The quarantine system is inconsistent, the sensors weren't focused on the surrounding space so they never saw the asteroid incoming. But it was all you, Dr. Snow. You didn't see it because you didn't want to look. Buried somewhere down deep in your subconscious was the denial, the hope that this had never really happened."

Snow scoffed. "Cowardly. I know."

"No, no, no," the Doctor said. "Sorrowful, despondent even... sure. But not cowardly. It's normal to hope for something better than reality. Really, it is. Trust me. I'm familiar with it. Sometimes you get so caught up in it that it feels real, and you wish with all your being that it were. But it isn't. I'm sorry but it isn't. But we can make it better. It might never be perfect again, but trust me when I say, it can always be better."

Quinn wasn't quite so sure, though. She felt so terrible for Dr. Snow. So many people that he'd known were dead now, and he'd been wired into the mainframe for so long that, for a time, he'd literally lost his mind, becoming enveloped in the fantasy of a world that wasn't perfect by a long show, but was so much less painful than the real one. How could he even begin to bounce back from an ordeal like that? Loathe though she was to admit it, it even made her problems seem to pale in comparison - at least the immediate ones. She had never sympathized well with people - as evidenced by the things she'd done over the past several months and years. Comparing herself to Snow, she felt terrible. In fact until this very moment, she hadn't had any idea it was possible for one person to loathe themselves so much. Here was a selfless man who'd willingly sacrificed everything for the people he cared about in a heartbeat, without even the slightest hesitation, while she had done everything in her power to hold together her perfect little life. She felt awful.

But then there was what the Doctor was saying; that no matter how bad things got, no matter how terrible the situation or how hopeless it seemed, you could always do something to make it better than it was. She wasn't sure she entirely believed that. "So what do we do?" she asked, her voice straining against tears that didn't seem to want to come completely.

"We do what we always do," he said. "We do something. Then something else, then something more still. That's the way to do it," he said. "The next step always follows the last one. Oooh, that's good. They should print that on bumper stickers and coffee mugs. Better than all that Keep Calm and Carry On business. Though to be fair I quite liked that one, too. Winston never did though, felt it missed the real root of what he was trying to get across, although he'd never tell anyone else that, bless his heart."

"You're rambling again," Quinn said.

"Right! Situation. I'm still locked behind a door that won't open without more power. Quinn's stuck in the hotzone in a containment suit, and Dr. Snow is wired into the mainframe somewhere and needs to be released. Quinn, you find Dr. Snow wherever he's holed up," the Doctor said. "But when you find him, don't open the door. If there are still particles aboard the station then the greatest concentration would be in the cargo bay, and you might have some on you. You've got to keep the suit on until we get you completely disinfected. That should be easy enough work for the TARDIS once you're aboard, especially once we have Dr. Green's sensor readings to go off of as a jumping off point."

"How do I find him?"

"There must be a directory that will lead you to the AR suite. Find it. Let me know when you're in place."

"I'm on it," she said, heading back out the main door and searching for signs to lead her in the right direction.

"Snow, you're the one in control of the quarantine lockdown on the station. I need you to lift the quarantine rating station-wide."

"But you just said there might still be infection that survived."

"Yes, there might. But we know that, and the station's forfeit at this point anyway. Now all it's doing is hindering our actions, and I need Quinn to be able to move about the station unhindered."

"So I find Snow," she said. "Then what?"

"Just sit tight. I've got a plan."

"What are you going to do?" Quinn asked him.

"If Dr. Snow will route me access up here, I can start making modifications to the station's system again," he said. "Once I'm not locked out anymore I can get things working the way I need them to."

"Alright, Doctor, that makes sense. Hang on, I'm rerouting control of main systems back up to the command deck." A moment later all the control panels and displays came on in the control room, just like they had been when the Doctor first stepped foot up there hours and hours ago earlier today.

"But you never said what you're actually going to do," Quinn said.

"Just some routine maintenance that's been sorely lacking around here as of late," he said, flashing a grin even though nobody was there to see it and at least hoping it'd carry through in his voice. "I'm going to get the teleport working."

4


	14. Chapter 14

The Doctor was a man on a mission now. It wasn't a very complicated mission: get the teleport working, get everyone gathered together, and get off this station. The sooner the better, he thought. And it was a very good thing that he was thinking that way, because if he allowed himself to stop focusing on the task at hand then he was very liable to realize that everything wasn't going to go as simply as he had planned. He had everything he needed. Whether he could get all the pieces into the right place at the right time or not... that was a different story.

He hadn't been completely honest with Dr. Snow. Not at first. He took a moment to double check his findings first, wanting to be absolutely, 100% sure before he said anything. And he was, as much as he didn't want to admit it. No matter what he did, there was no escaping one very crucial fact, and that fact was this: Dr. Green, in a fit of desperation, had tied control of the station's thrusters into the control matrix running inside Snow's simulation. It hadn't been a conscious decision on Snow's part to fly the station away from its home planet. It was much more likely that it was an autonomic response, just as natural as breathing - fight or flight in action, quite literally this time. But that didn't change the simple fact of the matter; as soon as Dr. Snow was disconnected from the simulation, the station would start to lose its orbit.

If the station fell, it would bring a shower of the silicate particles with it. From there they'd infect everything. The impact would destroy a lot of them but a lot would be scattered throughout the upper atmosphere, waiting to fall on the unsuspecting people below. They'd get into the groundwater and infect every form of life. And without any understanding of what was happening to them, every last man, woman, and child would die the same terrible death that had befallen everyone else aboard the station.

That meant, very simply, that they'd have to get the station out of orbit first. If he could get the teleport functioning like he hoped, realign the targeting arrays and disable the internal security bypass, plus work around a poorly designed quarantine system... if he could do all that then he could get back to the TARDIS, and from there tow the station out to a safe distance. That was the potential future he was going to focus on, he told himself, because the other one wasn't anywhere near as hopeful.

The other possibility was that he would have to have Snow do it - move the station a second time. But there was a problem with that; there was no way Snow would survive the process. At the beginning of this whole ordeal it must have been easy, as natural as walking across the street. But now, after fifteen months strapped to an artificial reality rig, muscles atrophying, undernourished, and dehydrated, there was almost no way that his nervous system would be up to the task. If Snow initiated the escape cycle it would probably be the very last thing that he ever did.

Then there was the third possibility, the one he was really preparing for in the back of his mind. The one where he got the teleport working, used it to transport Quinn and Snow back to the TARDIS and himself to the AR suite, and then wired himself in and did the procedure himself. Of course, there'd be no time to deactivate the simulation properly, and hot swapping connections might be fine on the home PC but it wasn't a good thing to do with the humanoid brain. There was a chance, even doing it this way, that Snow still wouldn't survive, but at least he'd have a fighting chance this way. The Doctor, on the other hand, probably wouldn't. If he went this route - and every minute it looked more and more likely that he would have to - then he'd be bypassing every single safety check in order to do it as quickly as possible. The brain damage would be irreversible. If he had to wire himself into the network that way, it would most certainly be a one way trip.

The scanners revealed the story. The inside of the station was completely clean - not a single molecule of the silicate could be found anywhere aboard. Quinn was safe and so was Dr. Snow, but he kept that knowledge to himself for the time being. If he had her waiting outside the door to the AR suite, then it was most likely that he'd be able to transport them both in one shot; who knew how much power he'd be able to scrape together for this? It wouldn't have surprised him if he only got one single teleport out of the system before it went kaput - not running on a jerry-rigged fusion reactor. At least this way she'd be safe.

He smiled as he worked, thinking of her and how brave she'd been today. She'd done so many things she'd never thought herself capable of, with a little guidance of course. But the fact that she didn't know how to jump start a miniature star off the top of her head didn't mean anything. What mattered was that she'd stepped up, kept a cool head, and done what had to be done. "Oh, Quinn Fabray," he muttered to himself, "how ever did you end up in Lima, Ohio?" Moments like these, he could see the kind of person she really was - not molded into anything else by people who only wanted something from her. She had so much potential, and he couldn't wait to help unlock some of it.

Except... he wouldn't get to. Not this time, not with her. Just surviving this was going to be an ordeal, and provided they all managed that, even then it seemed like she was on her way out. Which, he couldn't blame her for, if he was honest. But that didn't change the fact that he was going to miss her when she was gone. Ah well. It was probably best for her, anyway, to get out while she still could, before it really changed her, like it had the others. Before something happened to her, like Rose or Martha. What had that Elton fellow said in that video blog he posted? Elton, Ursula, and the rest of LINDA... all of them had suffered and they had barely grazed the edges of his life. "Maybe that's what happens when you touch the Doctor, even for a second," he'd said. Maybe it was better off this way. He just wished he'd known what he did to upset her so.

Then again he couldn't pretend he didn't know what that was about, either. She'd fallen in love, and he'd taken it away. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but sometimes that didn't matter. The good they'd done didn't outweigh the bad, not for her. Either way, he had to face it. His time with Quinn Fabray was coming to a close.

The teleport pods operated via a central control matrix, and once he had unfettered access to the systems he was finally able to make some progress. It was rough - a patchwork assembly of pieces, parts, and programming, but he was going to make it work. The individual units in the lobby were only meant to transport the person inside, but the larger cargo style transporters in the bay where Quinn had just been were perfect. They needed to be able to pick equipment off of passing ships and the planet's surface when it was still orbiting. They were equipped with the kind of sensors he needed, and all he had to do was turn the focusing beam in towards the station, instead of outside.

This entire station was a case study for safeguards and paranoia gone awry. In their efforts to create the perfect system to protect against both disease outbreak and siege by outside attackers, they'd managed just the opposite - creating an entirely self-contained environment where if even the tiniest thing went wrong, it could potentially destroy everything they'd worked so hard to create. He'd seen it enough times before; it was almost instinctual for humans to try to create perfection out of chaos, to see patterns where there weren't any. Unfortunately it was easy for them to lose sight of the simple fact that the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to go wrong. Just as he disabled the last security check which, he was sure, someone had considered a great idea at the time, the radio crackled to life near him.

"Doctor? I found the Artificial Reality suite," Quinn said. "I'm outside the door now."

"Good. Have you still got your helmet on?"

"Yes."

"Leave it secured, completely," he said. "And don't open that door until I say."

He flipped switches and turned dials like a madman, trying in vain to get the teleporter to lock onto both him and the two lifesigns down on the cargo deck far below. Getting Quinn and Snow was going to be easy. Getting himself out of here... that was going to be the hard part. The teleport wouldn't lock onto the command deck, no matter what he did - another safety feature gone wrong. That invalidated the other two plans pretty quickly. If he couldn't get himself to the TARDIS, he wouldn't be able to tow the station. If he couldn't get himself down to AR, he couldn't take manual control over the station either. That left only one option.

"Dr. Snow... I've come across a bit of a problem," he said. "And... I'm sorry."

"What's the trouble, Doctor?" Snow asked.

"I don't have direct navigational control over the station. But you do. And if I disconnect your mind from that machine then..."

"Then what, Doctor? I'm a grown man, I can take it."

"If I disconnect you, the station will stop compensating for the forces at work here. It's all tied into your brainstem, I'm afraid... autonomic responses only. The second you're disengaged, we start to lose altitude, and then we'll fall.

"Doesn't it take time for the orbit to... decay or something?" Quinn asked.

"Not with an artificial gravity generator sucking up everything in its path," he replied. "We're much smaller but we're pulling on that planet as much as if we were equal to its mass. The tidal forces alone on that planet must be tremendous."

"What are we going to do, then?" She asked.

"I'll set a new course," Snow said, quietly.

"Are you sure, Dr. Snow?" the Doctor asked. "Are you absolutely sure?"

"I've lived this lie for over a year," Snow replied. "I don't want to live in the fantasy world anymore. It's time for me to wake up, even if it means the end."

"The end? What are we talking about?" Quinn asked. "Doctor, what's going on?"

"Dr. Snow's mind has become integrated with the simulation," the Doctor replied, "but his body is weak. Extremely so."

"I thought you said it was, uh, autonomic," she said. "Just like breathing. It's easy."

"It's easy to do normally, what your brain's programmed to do," the Doctor said. "Try to stop breathing. Even more impossible, try to stop your heart beating. If he tries to wrest control away from that part of the brain... the stress on his nervous system could be catastrophic."

"I'll do it," Snow said. "If it will save you and the planet there's really no question about it.

"No, but..." Quinn started, but Snow cut her off.'

"Now, now, my dear there's no sense getting agitated over it. I'm an old man, I've had my time."

"You're good, though, Dr. Snow!" she said. "You're a good man! And letting good people die... that's not what we do, right Doctor? That's not what... right?" The Doctor said nothing. "Doctor, we saved my friends, my... my family back at McKinley. We should be able to do _this_. No paradox, no time travel. This has to be easy, right?"

"We shouldn't have done what we did," the Doctor replied.

"But we did it. You're telling me we can't accomplish this?"

"There's no way to do it!" He yelled, smacking a console and spinning around, shouting accusations at the air. "And believe me, I've been trying! All day I've been trying to come up with a way off this station, to save us and the innocent people on the planet below, and I can't. I just don't have what I need."

"But how can we just sit here and let this-"

"This is my life," in interrupted. "This is my life. These are the decisions I have to make every day - who lives and who dies. And I can't let personal relationships sacrifice that. I can't save everyone. I can't be all things to all people, and _I can't be in two places_ at once! If I could get off this command deck then I could do something, but I can't. I'm trapped and there's nothing I can do but try to get you to safety and save as many people as I can."

Quinn was quiet, breathing heavily on her side of the connection. She took a deep breath, let it out through her nose, and simply said, "No."

"What?"

"This is stupid. You're so wrapped up in guilt you can't see the obvious answer right in front of your face. You said sometimes you needed someone to stop you. So I will." She nudged the blue bar with her chin, cutting off the comm signal so he couldn't hear her, ripped off the helmet, and ran into the AR suite, finding Snow's body there hooked up to a helmet pulsing with lights and connected to a central computer via thousands of fiber optic cables.

"What are you doing? Quinn, no, don't do that! It isn't safe! Quinn!"


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N: Alright, there we go! Team TARIDS reunited! And of course they're immediately on the run, so just another day at work for the Doctor.**

**This is a shorter chapter but the next one or two should wrap everything up, and I needed a breaking point. This became it.**

* * *

"Quinn? What are you doing? Get out of there!"

There was no reply on the comm channel. Whatever she was up to, she wasn't saying a word, at least not to him. But she must have been saying something to Snow, because he could hear his semi-stunned replies, still carrying over the station-wide intercom. "Uh... yes, of course,

" he said. "I understand. Immediately."

"Dr. Snow? Doctor Snow, what is she telling you?"

"Yes, of course I will. Right away, ma'am."

"What's happening down there? What is going on?" There was a buzzing sound from the corner of the room, and as he looked into the corner a blinding white flash appeared for a fraction of a second, then faded away. He covered his eyes with his arm instinctually and blinked to clear the after images from his vision. When he looked back up he saw Quinn, standing in the corner, no longer wearing the environment suit. His mouth fell open as he stared at her. "Quinn! What are you doing up here?"

"I used the teleport pad down on that deck to come up here," she replied.

"But the scanners won't lock onto the command deck, I said."

"You said they couldn't lock onto you and remove you," she said. "You didn't say anything about me coming up here."

"But why? Why would you do this? Now we're both trapped!"

"Are we?"

"Yes! The door's completely sealed until someone comes from the planet who's authorized to end the lockdown. Until the rescue team arrives there's no way to open that door except to cut through it, and the rescue team isn't coming, not ever!" While he was saying this, she had walked over to the door and was now staring at it, unmoving. "I was going to get you out. I was going to save you."

She took a deep breath. "I know," she said, then too quietly for him to hear she muttered, "here goes nothing."

She reached out and pressed the door controls on the side of the doorframe. Nothing happened for a few tense seconds. Then, slowly, the heavy blast doors that had been covering the entrance split with a hiss and slid back into their recessed panels in the walls. Once that had happened, there was a panel with a little red crank, just like all the others down below, that was no longer covered by the armored lockdown doors. She reached up, turned the crank, and with the sound of pressure being released the doors popped open a crack, no longer held shut.

The Doctor stared after her, flabbergasted. "This door's still pretty heavy," she said, turning to face him.

"Aren't you going to help me move it?"

"How did you end the lockdown?"

"I didn't. But I listened to what you said earlier. Tied into the system like this Dr. Snow's conscious mind was available to us both to talk to. But the unconscious mind was tied directly into the computer, making it a part of him. You couldn't access his unconscious mind. But I could."

"You convinced him that you were the rescue team," the Doctor said, realization dawning. "So when you came up here you'd be authorized to open the door."

"I may not be a super genius like you are, but I know how to influence people."

"More than that, though, you figured it out, saw a pattern I was too busy or frightened or excited to miss." He smiled, a real and true, genuine grin. "Quinn Fabray, you're brilliant, has anyone ever told you that?"

And for the first time in a while she smiled back - really smied.

"Doctor..." the voice that croaked out through the intercom wasn't the young, vibrant, strong and confident one that they'd been hearing since they arrived on the station and reactiated the computer. Clearly this was still Dr. Snow, but now he sounded old, and tired. Suddenly every minute of those fifteen months was being carried in his voice. "Doctor, I'm awake," Snow said, and immediately collapsed into a fit of coughing. "I'm awake... I'm..." The station shuddered, much as it had when it was first hit, and the deck pitched up at an unnatural angle, once again sending objects and people alike sliding across their respective rooms. The intercom cut out just seconds after Snow made a sound as if he were falling off of something.

"Dr. Snow, are you alright?" Quinn asked, but she barely got it out when the Doctor rushed over to the door and started pushing one half of it back into the recessed door slot in the wall.

"We have to get out of here," the Doctor said. "And quickly."

"What's happening?"

"Best guess, the good Doctor set the computer to free him after the rescue team ended the lockdown procedure. Now that's true, he's disconnected from the computer, including the orbital thrusters. This station is going down." He shoved the doors back as mightily as he could and grabbed Quinn's hand. "Come on, back to the TARDIS!"

Just like when the'd first arrived, the Doctor was dragging her through the corridors of the station, this time back to the lift that would take them down to reception, where the TARDIS was still parked.

"Wait, we can't go back to the TARDIS. What about Dr. Snow?"

"TIme's running out. We'll have to use the teleport pods to bring him to us."

"How are we supposed to do that?" She asked. "I thought you said any shock might kill him."

The lift arrived and they both got aboard. "We have to try."

"No," Snow said, groaning. Apparently he had pulled himself up to a sitting position where he could reach a mic once again (or, technically, for the first time). He was panting and wheezing, and there was an uncertain quality to his voice as he spoke. "No, don't do that. I may not be wired in anymore but I can still control most station functions from here. I'm firing full burn on the thrusters."

"If you do that," the Doctor warned, "there won't be any fuel left to maintain the orbit."

"I know," Snow said. "That's not what I intend to do."

"Fusion generator cooling system has been disabled," intoned a monotone computer voice when Snow had finished talking. "The station will self-destruct in approximately five minutes."

"What?!" Quinn exclaimed. "I thought this was safe! I thought you said fusion reactors didn't suffer catastrophic failures like that."

"We have five minutes, maybe less. We have to go!"

"But what's going to happen?"

"Fusion reactors don't explode by accident," the Doctor said. "They just stop working. But that doesn't mean there's no such thing a fusion based weapon."

"Oh, no."

"The flame, well, I say flame, will envelop the entire station, leaving nothing behind whatsoever except scraps," he said. "We have to get out of here before that happens."

3


	16. Chapter 16

**A/N: And another adventure comes to a close. I think I will take that hiatus of a few weeks I talked about before, try to get a jump on the next story so that hopefully, I'm not writing them at 11:30 Sunday nights and then posting them without my amazing beta reader having looked them over. But do look for a new one starting quite soon.**

* * *

"We can't just leave!" Quinn said as she chased him down the corridor to the lift. As soon as the lift doors came into view he raised the sonic and called for the elevator from down the hall.

"Either we leave or we die," he said. "In order to get you out, I was willing to risk myself." He came to a sudden halt at the entrance to the lift, skidding to a stop as he waited for the lift to get up there. He turned to face her. "But I'm not risking you." The doors opened and he pulled her inside with him.

"What about Dr. Snow? You can't just let him sacrifice himself for no good reason!"

"He's saving the planet below," the Doctor said as he pressed for reception and the lift doors closed. "That's a very good reason. As good reasons go it's among the best."

"So this is what we do, huh?" she asked. "We show up, we get people killed, and then off we go?" He didn't reply, didn't even look at her. He just stared at the elevator buttons with his arms crossed in front of his chest. "You know what? Forget what I said earlier. You deserve to feel guilty."

The doors opened, and they were right back where they had started this morning - the TARDIS still exactly where they'd parked it. He rushed up to the Police Box, jammed the key in the lock and opened the doors. "Doctor, don't! This is wrong!" she said, stomping up the ramp after him. "We have to go back down there!"

"There's just two and a half minutes left. You'd never get down there in time. Some of the lifts aren't working, and emergency bulkheads are still slammed shut over the whole station." He twisted a few knobs and pulled a lever, and the whole ship started to shudder as the groaning noise she was now all too familiar with assaulted her ears.

"Doctor..."

Then all at once it stopped. The Doctor ran back to the doors and threw them open, to reveal that they weren't in the waiting room anymore - they were in the AR suite. "Best to take a shortcut," he said.

Dr. Snow was staring in wide-eyed astonishment at the box that had just appeared out of thin air in the room with him. As the Doctor and Quinn hurried out, he tried to force himself to sit up fully, only managing to slump over.

"Don't try to move," the Doctor said. "You're still in neuralytic shock." Despite the simulation being over, Snow was still connected into all the machines wired into his brain. Addressing Quinn now, he said, "Watch that panel. Tell me if that number dips below nineteen, and keep an eye on the clock."

She nodded. "Two minutes!" The Doctor raised the sonic and pointed it at the devices attached to Snow's head. "The level's dropping. Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Thirty-one!"

Snow was still struggling, but the Doctor placed a firm hand on his chest. "Sssh. Quiet now. We've got to lower the integration ratio. This might hurt. I'm sorry."

"Ninety seconds," Quinn said, watching her console closely. "Reading's at Twenty-two."

"Come on, come on, come on," he said, as if he could urge the screwdriver to work any faster.

"Twenty-one... twenty... nineteen... eighteen! It's at eighteen!"

"Come help me!" he said, ripping the helmet off of Snow's head and putting one of the weak man's arms over his shoulder. Quinn draped the other arm over her shoulders and together they dragged him into the TARDIS as the floor panels under them began to shudder.

Quinn spared one look back at the console as she shut the doors. "Just under a minute!" she said. The central column rose and fell as she helped Snow onto one of the seats around the console. "Where are we going?"

"Oh, not far," the Doctor said.

She glanced up at the scanner. "Just outside?" she asked, seeing the station's exterior show up on the monitor. "I thought you said there was going to be an explosion!"

"There is," he said. "So hold on tight!" She felt the ship lurch as it suddenly took on a huge burst of speed. TARDIS travel was always uneven but this felt less like the shifting and lilting of a ship at sea and more like an airplane threatening to shake itself apart. "Hold on," the Doctor was saying, more to himself than anyone else. "Hold on, hold on, wait for it... now!" And he brought his fist down hard upon a smaller switch right next to him on the console. She watched as the station rushed away at an alarming speed - or rather as they rushed away from it - and seconds later it exploded into a fiery ball, the sparks and flames dying unnaturally quickly deprived of oxygen.

The Doctor slumped against the console and took a deep breath. "Once Snow was disconnected, the thrusters stopped firing," he said. "I had to tow the station far enough away that none of those shards would be shot along back to the planet. That'll be the end of it."

Quinn smiled. "So... we did it? We did it!"

"Yeah," he said, grinning as well. "We did it. We don't make a bad team, you and me."

"No, we don't," she agreed. She looked at him, tearing her eyes away from the display on the scanner screen. "There's something I forgot to do when I finally got back to you," she said.

"What's that?"

She reached over and hugged him as tightly as she could. "Oh. Okay. This is nice." They stayed that way for a moment, until Dr. Snow started coughing on the seat behind them. "Now we just need to get this fellow fixed up," the Doctor said. "A couple days bed rest, I think, and then I know the perfect place."

* * *

Paris in 1890 was much the same as Paris in 1888 had been, but the tower was finished now.

Dr Snow sat opposite the Doctor next to Quinn at their table ("Our regular table," Quinn had joked, though Snow didn't understand what she meant) marveling at the sights and sounds around him. "It's all true, what you said," he muttered. "You're impossible!"

"Just improbable," the Doctor replied as three plates of crepes arrived. He reached over, spooned up a huge mound of whipped cream, and splatted it right on Snow's plate. "Now you," he said, "eat up. You're all skin and bones."

"I can't believe all you've done for me," the oncologist said.

"Oh, but you've done a lot for us, too," the Doctor said. "And for yourself. And others. You saved all those people in the escape pod, two planets... not bad for a year's work if you ask me. Well, I mean... by most standards. And... consider this an apology of sorts. I'm rubbish at apologies just call this... oh, I dunno... apology-ish. I'm sorry I assumed you were a megalomaniac computer who turned on its creators and then went mad with power."

"I think that's just called an apology, Doctor," Quinn said, laughing gently at him.

"Oh, fine, please yourself," he said, but he smiled broadly. "But you're a good person, Dr. Alden Snow. One of the very best. Not many people would sacrifice themselves for others so readily."

"I suppose that's why one becomes a doctor," Snow replied. "Putting the wellbeing of others before yourself... well... I suppose one might say that's the very point of mercy." He took a sip of the coffee. "Oh, this is marvelous," he said.

"See! That's what I said. Didn't I say?" he asked Quinn.

"I'm sure it's good," she said. "No caffeine for the pregnant girl, though."

"As a doctor I approve of this decision," Snow said, patting her on the shoulder.

"Fine, fine," the Doctor said, raising his hands in surrender. "Outvoted once again." They were all silent for a moment, then, a bit more solemnly than he had spoken a moment earlier, the Doctor asked, "Where shall we take you now?"

Snow was pensive for a moment, glanced back at the carafe of coffee, then said, "Can we get some of this to go? I'm about a year late for a coffee with an enchanting young woman, but perhaps, just perhaps, she's still got time to meet me for a quick one."

* * *

Quinn leaned against the door to the TARDIS, watching Snow go, two Styrofoam cups of French coffee, fresh ground centuries ago, in his hands.

"Now," the Doctor said, echoing his earlier question. "where shall we take _you_?" She didn't reply. "It'll have to be somewhere good. Hmm..."

"So you want me to go?"

"Your choice," he said. "New home somewhere or... stay with me. It really is up to you." She was still staring out the door after Snow's retreating figure. "Did you love him?" he asked, almost surprised to hear the question even though he'd asked it.

"Dr. Snow?" She asked lightly. "He wasn't really my type."

"You know who I mean," the Doctor said, thinking of Daniel.

She shook her head slowly as she turned and closed the door. "I don't know." He raised his eyebrows in surprise at her response. "I wish I knew for sure," she continued. "I don't know what I want about anything anymore."

"Oh. It's just... you seemed... well, that is to say, I thought..."

"I blamed you for what happened?"

"Well..."

"You think that's what's been going these past few days?"

"Isn't it?"

"What happened... it wasn't your fault. It was mine."

"It really wasn't," the Doctor said. "That stowaway..."

"That had nothing to do with it. I made the worst mistake, and I knew better. I got close to him."

"Oh, come on," he said, flashing a grin. "You can't really believe its down to that?"

"All the places we've been, all the things we've seen... out of all of that universe, nobody cares about me. Everyone I've ever been close to has abandoned me."

He shook his head. "Impossible. Can't be."

"Oh really?" she said snidely. "Name one person, a single solitary person, who hasn't turned their back on me. My dad threw me out when he found out I was pregnant. My mom let him. She didn't stand up for me at all, and she didn't offer me a drop of kindness or support. Brittany and Santana were my best friends until coach Sylvester kicked me off the Cheerios. Then I was like a leper. I had Finn, and I really cared about him, but when he found out what I'd done he wouldn't even listen to me. Puck was around about long enough to get me pregnant, and I think it might have been his longest relationship ever just because of the 30 minutes it took with the wine coolers."

"But..."

She continued on, not letting him get a word in edgewise. "I wasn't looking for anyone. Really, I wasn't. But then he... Daniel... was just there, right in front of me like he just... just dropped out of the sky. And he was perfect."

"You can't know that," he said.

"No, I can't. But I do know that every time I let myself get close to someone, it ends."

"You've still got me," he said.

"Sure, for now," she replied.

He stopped whatever he was doing on the console and walked up to her, placing a hand comfortingly on her shoulder. "You're right. Life is temporary. It's all about... change and flux and _stuff _that happens when you least expect it. We probably won't spend the rest of our lives together. The day will probably come when we go our separate ways. But I promise you, if that day ever comes, it'll be because it's what _you _want. And if it's not what you want, then I will do everything in my power to come and find you."

She looked up into his eyes. "Promise?"

"Promise. Just... no more keeping me at arm's length, ok?"

She smiled. "Okay."

He returned the smile. "Perfect." He clapped his hands together. "Now then. What can I show you..."

"Um..."

"What, you have an idea? Anything you like, anywhere at all."

"Well... I know we got sidetracked saving a planet, but, technically... I still haven't been to the doctor yet."

The Doctor smiled. "Quite right. How about a nice, simple, after-hours clinic in Michigan, as far removed from anything exciting as can be."

She chucked. "Anywhere's fine, as long as we go together."

**THE END**

* * *

**The Doctor and Quinn will return, after a short break, in **_**The King's Players**_**.**


End file.
